Little Known Gems: Reviews and Interpretations

THE FOUR OF CUPS, BLOOD MERIDIAN, AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS

2012-02-26T04:09:00.008-05:00

There's a scene in the Scott Ridley adaptation of the Joseph Conrad tale, The Duellists, where the mistress of the protagonist goes to a tarot card reader to get insight into her personal dilemma. The seer throws the decision back at her with the moon card and the path between the two dogs. Tells her the cards say she must make her own decision. Well done, I think.

For the decisions are not in the cards but in ourselves. I'd be glad if I could make a living by explaining that to people. Card reading started out as a parlor game and evolved into a method of hyped divination used by con artists to fleece the gullible. But it is still a parlor game too, more fun than an ouija board, and the tarot cards themselves are sometimes interesting works of art.

There are authors who work tarot cards into their books as symbolic tools of the subconscious, and the most significant example of this may be in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. In the novel, members of the gang have their fortunes told by a gypsy card reader. The protagonist, who is known only as "the child" and then as "the kid" and late in the novel as "the man," draws the four of cups.

Well, the legend is that McCarthy saw the four of cups in a dream, nailed to the wall of a house (which is described in the novel), not knowing what the card meant. John Sepich, a longtime friend of McCarthy, devoted a full chapter in his famous Notes On Blood Meridian to "Tarot and Divination." It is his opinion that the interpretation four of cups is the key to understanding the meaning of the novel.

The four of cups is a rather blue-collar, low ranking card, a bit like the four of spades in a regular deck. Even in Stuart R. Kaplan's massively illustrated three-volume Encyclopedia of Tarot, the four of cups doesn't get much space and hardly any illustrations. Rank is not so important in divination, however, and a card's meaning usually depends on what company it keeps.

Details vary greatly from deck to deck, but the gist of the card is this: A young man or woman sits with their back to a tree, gazing rather blankly at three cups, which are sometimes on their sides, empty. The idea is that of angst, a disappointment with material things. Meanwhile, out of the sky--or out of the subconscious--a hand from out of nowhere offers a better cup, or perhaps a spiritual awakening.

Not all tarot decks conform to this narrative regarding the four of cups, but most have something like it. Sepich cites sources to say that this card is associated with mercy and a divided heart. That, in the McCarthy novel, it foretells the kid's later display of mercy in the desert, and it is for that reason that the Judge eventually destroys him.

There of course is more of the tarot in Blood Meridian, but the dim light of humanity that persists in the novel is built around the evolution of empathy in "the kid," who becomes "the man" in the narrative directly after giving mercy to the old woman in the desert. Mercy was an act of free agency and marked the kid's coming of age.

Novels, like tarot cards, are subject to different interpretations, but I certainly agree with John Sepich on this. McCarthy stresses the notion of the subconscious, and his novels are deeply layered. If you want to know about the historical references in the novel, Sepich's work is not to be missed. He also maintains a site, link, on the web in association with Christopher Forbis and some other McCarthy scholars, which includes concordances of the novels.

Then too, over at Ken's Occult McCarthy site, link, there are more detailed references to freemasonry, the tarot, parodies of McCarthy's prose, and much more. And of course, there are always many serious interpretations being discussed at the Cormac McCarthy Society, link. I've talked about McCarthy's works in this blog several times, including a Wednesday's Western review of Blood Meridian at this link.

We've seen a surge in the number of artistic tarot decks lately, or so it seems to me. I can recall when there were only two or three different styles available, but now they seem without number. It would not surprise me if someone soon came up with a Blood Meridian Tarot Deck, if they haven't already done so.

Scott Ridley has been named the director of the new Cormac McCarthy movie, The Counselor--in case you haven't heard. The cast includes Michael Fassbender and possibly Brad Pitt or Javier Bardem. And of course McCarthy has long been said to be putting on the finishing touches to his newest novel, The Passenger. James Franco is still trying to make movies of both Blood Meridian and Child of God.

We'll see.
_______

Friday's Forgotten Book: ROCK PAPER TIGER by Lisa Brackmann

2012-02-24T02:10:00.004-05:00

I've been a Kentuckian all of my adult life, save for those four years during the Viet Nam War when the draft forced me to serve overseas at Naval bases, in Morocco and Cuba mostly. Foreign countries give you an enhanced appreciation of home, but serving in the military bureaucracy can make you hate bureaucracies, if you were not already inclined to do so.

I tend to agree with Major General Smedley D. Butler, the highly decorated soldier of many conflicts, who said that "war is a racket" designed to make money for those rich men who control the U. S. Government, and at the expense of those drafted to fight. I read Butler's story recently in Sally Denton's excellent The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.

Anyway, I thought about all of this when choosing my selection for Forgotten Book of the Week, Lisa Brackmann's ROCK PAPER TIGER. It was her first book, published in 2010, and right away she garnered a hard core of fans. There were many lauding reviews and the book was on many best-of lists at the year's end. It isn't forgotten by any means, but those of us who are fans think it deserves a much wider audience.

Rock Paper Tiger

Brackmann's refreshingly vibrant protagonist is an Iraq War veteran who follows her husband to China to live after her service time is up. Her husband has deserted her and she is left to fend for herself, giving us a keen look at contemporary life in China, something that is unusual to find in an American mystery or thriller. And this is a thriller--despite what some readers have said at Amazon--it is both a conspiracy/political thriller and a virtual-gaming thriller.

Lisa Brackmann

An example of the author's dialogue:

"So, Trey, he does not work for American Government?"

"Big Corporation." I laugh. "What's the difference?"

John nods sagely "You know, here in China, PLA, Peoples' Liberation Army, owns many businesses. They hide this better than before, but still it is this way. So maybe this is somewhat the same in America."

This irritates me, and I'm not sure why. "It's the other way around in America," I tell him. "Companies own the Army. They send us where they want us to go. To do their shit for them. So they can get rich."
____________

There are several interviews with the author across the web, and she even has shared her query letter that landed her book with a publisher. In that letter, she compared her spunky protagonist to Laura Lippman's, which only makes me want to read more of Lippman's books now.

And of course, I'll soon be sending for Brackmann's second novel.

HOW TO LIKE IT by Stephen Dobyns and THE CRY OF THE WILD GOOSE by Frankie Laine

2012-02-23T22:20:00.004-05:00

Today, February 24th, was like a perfect spring day in these Kentucky woods until it clouded up and rained late in the day. Just before it rained, my wife and I were cutting brush on the edge of the farm pond. We heard the cry of the wild geese before we saw them, flapping convoys in V formation winging their way north, lower than usual--perhaps because of the cloud cover. A sight that takes our breath away, year after year.

Stephen Dobyns has written many breathtaking works of art. One of my favorites is his midlife crisis poem, "How To Like It." A dog is featured here, perhaps the same English setter as in Winter's Journey, but here the dog is symbolic of the itchy tendency of a man to break off his relationship and light out, smelling the wanderlust of fall. It works for the wanderlust of spring too, as in the Frankie Laine recording of "The Cry of the Wild Goose."

Last night I heard the wild goose cry
winging north in the cold blue sky.
I tried to sleep but it wasn't no use
cause I am a brother to the old wild goose.

The cabin is warm and the snow is deep
and I got a woman who lies asleep.
She'll wake up at tomorrow's dawn
and she'll find, poor critter, that her man is gone.

Spring is coming and the ice will break
and I can't linger for a woman's sake.
She'll see a shadow pass overhead
and she'll find a feather beside my bed.

Cause my heart knows what the wild goose knows,
and I must go where the wild goose goes.
Wild goose, brother goose--which is best?
A wandering fool or a heart at rest?

Well, doesn't he know that geese mate for life? Apparently not.

The Stephen Dobyns poem below is both funny and sad--sad because the man is torn, having not quite learned how to love deeply enough to be happy, staying true to what is real and important. If you have not yet read this one before, you are in for a treat.

___________

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.

The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which are shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.

The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.

The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.

But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.

But the dogs says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?

But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept--
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.
_____

You can hear Frankie Laine sing "Cry of the Wild Goose" at this link: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=frankie+laine+cry+of+the+wild+goose

Friday's Forgotten Book: Stephen Dobyns' SARATOGA BACKTALK

2012-02-17T08:42:00.004-05:00

This is a light comic mystery with poetic undertones. If you've tried to read others by this author earlier in the series and laid them aside, go back and start with this one. If you're completely new to the rich variety of Stephen Dobyns' novels and poetry, you might also want to start here.

This is a continuation of the Charlie Bradshaw/Saratoga private eye mysteries, but the narrator here is Victor Plotz, who often works for Bradshaw as Angel Martin worked for Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. Like Angel, Plotz is no angel, but he's older, smarter, and funnier.

I always hear Plotz in something like a Rodney Dangerfield voice. Just listen:

"I got a girlfriend. Actually I got more than one but this is the main one, at least for now . . .Her name is Rosemary. . .She's fifty-one. She's big and plump and I call her the Queen of Softness. If you ask me, women only come into their prime after they hit fifty. Before that they've got too much bone and muscle: baby machines too easily distracted by what they have manufactured. They remind me of Japanese car companies, all style and no soul. Before menopause a woman can be a real nuisance, she's packed full of hidden agendas and most of them concern her kids.'

"But after fifty a woman's kids are usually grown up and she can turn herself over to pleasure. And they get soft at that age, almost spongy. It's the time when a woman gives up her figure and takes on a shape. Rosemary Larkin has a wonderful pear shape. No aerobics for her. Who wants a lady with a figure like a letter knife.'

"Rosemary has got this hot tub in her basement and we sit in it and play Elevator. I put my hands under her breasts--big white stocking-cap breasts with nipples like the eye of the cyclops who Kirk Douglas bumped off in that movie about Ulysses. I put my hands under Rosemary's breasts so I can feel their weight, their very consequence and magnitude, and Rosemary calls out, 'Eighth Floor!" and slowly I raise her breasts up out of the bubbling water. Then she calls out 'Fourth floor!' and slowly I lower them again. Then she calls 'Bargain Basement!' and we go down, down, down.'

"You can't play that kind of game with a younger woman. . .A woman like the Queen of Softness isn't wound up tight about getting someplace or not getting someplace, she already lives someplace. She's arrived. She stands on her life with both feet. She doesn't mind that I am fifty-nine, or thereabouts, and that our skin is squishy and yielding. Not only has our skin been around the track, it has been the track. It's got history. We rub each other down with body oil and we're like two big seals flopping together on her big waterbed."
______

Plotz always confesses himself to be an Angel Martin type of rat, but his droll manner is more endearing and the plot provides him with many opportunities to be wildly funny. I was first attracted to the series because of the horseracing-related plots, but soon I became hooked on the characters and the writing. Dobyns seemed to get better with every book.

I discussed his stand-alone, The Church of Dead Girls, last Halloween, and his book on poetry, Best Words, Best Order, is one of the most significant of its kind.

This month, I'm rereading his most recent book of meditative poems, Winter's Journey, about a poem a day when a mellow mood strikes me. It deserves to be published in a deluxe hardcover edition, but flimsy paperbacks with small print are all that even the best poetry can muster these days, or so it seems. Even with gifts from Amazon and a score of other sponsors.

In his poetry, Dobyns sounds nothing like Rodney Dangerfield at all. Instead, I hear him as the sage and older Paul Newman, and I suppose now that I always will. His books have a lasting place on our "most-loved" shelves.

I plan to give my analysis of Winter's Journey a bit later.

THE GUARD: The Best Dark Comedy I've Seen In Years

2012-02-15T00:03:00.001-05:00

THE GUARD is a dark comedy for adults, the best I've seen in a long time. Much of the humor is intellectual, you might say, but a lot of it is also slapstick, lower-grade stuff. I can't think of a movie to compare it to; it is that unique.

We saw it the day after I reviewed Adrian McKinty's COLD COLD GROUND, and the book had some of the same elements as the movie. Gangsters; drug violence; bribes and extortion; religious, racial, and gender prejudice; casual sexual relations; jibes at the Brits, at Dublin, at the corruption of policemen in general.

It may sound like the usual, but it isn't. Brendan Gleeson as Gerry Boyle is corrupt, but he is not conventionally corrupt. He lives within an existential code of his own.

My favorite scene is where Gleeson and the FBI agent are about to confront the drug smugglers. The FBI man says that he's sent for back-up, that they should wait for back-up, but Boyle knows that back-up won't be coming because the entire western coast of Ireland is on the take.

Like a lot of scenes in here, this underplayed with comic effect, but you get it. It's just you and me, Boyle tells him. There will be no back-up. Colexico provides a suitable spaghetti western soundtrack at this point in the movie.

The entire soundtrack is witty, quirky, surprising. They open the credits with John Denver's "Leaving On a Jet Plane," which makes you wonder if Boyle himself didn't come up with that one as he boards a plane on the way to a sequel.

I also especially loved a scene where the three main smugglers discuss philosophy and nothingness, all to comic effect. The overall acting was splendid and none too serious, as you can tell by listening to the backstory comments on the DVD--where writer/director John Michael McDonagh teams up with the actors.

I know they are having trouble finding an actor capable of playing Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden for the movie of Blood Meridan. Maybe Gleeson could do it; he's big enough, with the right sense of humor.

We'll see.

Valentine's Day: What's Love Got To Do, Got To Do With It?

2012-02-14T18:04:00.006-05:00

What's love got to do with it? Plenty. My cup runneth over, and I'm grateful for the day.

Yeah, I know. Like almost every other holiday, this one is overly commercialized. Sales of candy, cards, jewelry and sexy lingerie depend on it.

Over at one of my favorite blogs, The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce provides links to Valentine's Day history, and over at Killer Covers, link, he gives us some noir book covers with kiss in the title.

But just as sex is much more than a kiss, and just as love is so much more than sex, the meaning of today for us is much more than randy sex, much more than an excuse to eat chocolate, much more than "sentimental movies and sappy songs."

Valentine's Day is yet another day of gratitude, a reminder that we need to stay mindful and grateful for our love this and every day. Every day is Thanksgiving, every day is Christmas, every day is New Year's Day, every day is Groundhog Day, every day is Valentine's Day, and it should be.

You need to look beyond the commercialism and materialism of these holidays to see what is real and eternal, to see what is really important in life.

Again this year, I'm posting Kenneth Fearing's funny verse, and I'll discuss the way I see it below:

Love 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile

All right, I may have lied to you and about you,
     and made a few
     pronouncements a bit too sweeping,
     perhaps, and possibly
     forgotten to tag the bases here or there.
And damned your extravagance,
     and maligned your tastes,
     and libeled your relatives,
     and slandered a few of your friends.
O.K.
     Nevertheless, come back.

Come home. I will agree to forget the statements
     that you issued
     so copiously to the neighbors and the press.
And you will forget that figment of your imagination,
     the blonde from Detroit;
I will agree that your lady friend who lives above us
     is not crazy, bats, nutty as they come,
     but on the contrary rather bright,
And you will concede that poor old Steinberg
     is neither a drunk, nor a swindler,
     but simply a guy on the eccentric side,
     trying to get along.

Because I forgive you, yet, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise.
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive,
     and pardon you, in short, for being you.

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me
     you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black,
     all other hours are cold and far away,
     and now, this minute, the stars
     are very near and bright.

Come back. We will have a celebration to end all
     celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us,
     and a couple of boys from the office,
     and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane
     woman who lives upstairs, and a few reporters,
     if anything should break.
_____

What's wrong with the way most Americans view love? Plenty.

Just as in the title of the verse above, most Americans assign "love" a monetary value. Materialists themselves in a material culture, they see material value in everything, and they bargain everything, tit for tat. Their love is conditional and hence temporary. Their material, superficial possessive love does not last, for they fail to see what is real but not material, they fail to appreciate what cannot be weighed and measured on a scale.

Their lovers are something they possess, trophy lovers, simply material things to collect and to be disposed of when they lose that glamor, that material value.

Lots of popularly acclaimed books professing to be love stories only deal with this form of possessive love, with juvenile ego trips rather than love itself, with the shallow and temporal rather than the eternal and deep. According to these materialistic authors, finding love is something like figuring out the most glamorous date available to take to the prom.

Such stories are often clever, witty, and sometimes fun to read, but they are also sad because these authors have not yet learned to see beyond the material. Their most "adult" stories are stuck in a juvenile mode. They can be verse but never poetry, because materialists do not yet believe in the transcendant where love resides.

Adrian McKinty's THE COLD COLD GROUND

2012-02-09T15:57:00.004-05:00

THE COLD COLD GROUND is a brilliant new thriller/police procedural by Adrian McKinty, a multicultural writer of considerable experience and impeccable qualifications. Although Soho Press inexplicably passed on publishing it here in the United States, you can still buy it at Amazon (as I did), for less than $20 and it is well worth the expense and effort.

Set in Northern Ireland's Carrickfergus during the terrorism (or the Troubles as they are politely and routinely called), The Cold Cold Ground is a detective yarn spun against the backdrop of history. It is also a period piece bristling with the attitudes and artifacts of that time. For example, the narrator/detective protagonist describes the lady pathologist as looking like Samantha of Bewitched , certainly a generational reference, but young people will still get the idea.

A lot of the Irish slang was new to me, but the context was such that I had no difficulty in picking it up. It added rather than subtracted from the reading experience, so much easier than reading Peter Temple's Australian slang in his own equally brilliant but more widely known detective yarn, Truth (the winner of the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award for best novel).

The title of The Cold Cold Ground comes not from the Stephen Foster spiritual but from Tom Waits' song, quoted in an epigraph. A playlist of the music mentioned in the text includes Blondie, Juice Newton, and several others familiar to most Americans.

Secular Americans generally find it hard to relate to Ireland's Protestant/Catholic partisan divide. Readers of Lawrence Block's popular and savvy Scudder series will be familiar with his Irish gangsters, ex-patriots relocated to New York. The Cold Cold Ground will show you the other side of the coin in a very real way.

Do a search and you can find several other glowing international reviews of this novel, but my advice is to avoid spoilers and to let the novel surprise you with its delightful twists and turns. McKinty is a stylist and his protagonist often muses on the ironies and complexities of human existence. It is both beautiful and astonishingly well grounded in history.

Hard aground to the cold, cold ground.

You can listen to Charlotte Church's lovely "Carrickfergus" at this link. And the Celtic Woman version is here, link.

The ATLAS SHRUGGED Fantasy from Thomas Frank's PITY THE BILLIONAIRE

2012-02-05T21:29:00.005-05:00

"The ultimate act of thirties usurpation is Ayn Rand's thousand-page 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. To its present-day fans, it is a work of amazing prescience, the story of the overregulating, liberty-smothering Obama administration told more than fifty years before it actually happened.'

"For me, it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster, embraced without a glimmer of awareness by the protest movement that the disaster stirred up.'

"The story of a group of business leaders fighting big-government oppression, Atlas Shrugged has been popular since it was first published, especially among egotistical fourteen-year-olds and among the sort of self-pitying mogul types who see themselves in the book's tycoon heroes. For free-market true believers, the tome is their very own Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, more accurately, their Caesar's Column.'

"With Barack Obama's inauguration in January of 2009, sales of Atlas Shrugged registered a remarkable uptick. Everyone could see that it was the novel for the era. The opinion page of the Wall Street Journal hailed it as the tale of our times foretold.

The influential blogger Michelle Malkin urged readers to emulate the book's entrepreneurial heroes. Officers of the Ayn Rand legacy organizations began appearing at Tea Party rallies, stoking the fires of discontent; protest signs started quoting famous lines from the novel; someone issued silver coins emblazoned with the name of the book's main character; and a movie based on the book was released to the great anticipation of the resurgent Right.'

"Rand fans heard the call to the colors. Among our characters, Rick Santelli and Mike Pompeo are both disciples. Paul Ryan suggested in 2009 that 'we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking."

Among the freshman class in Congress, the fandom burns brightly. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin refers to Atlas Shrugged as his 'foundational book.' Representative David Schweikert of Arizona cites Atlas Shrugged as his favorite book, Representative Rick Crawford of Arkansas quotes Rand on his Twitter feed, and Senator Rand Paul describes Atlas Shrugged as a "must-read classic in the cause of liberty."

According to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the other Ayn Rand psychopaths, it is the superior man who is being persecuted, "the ownership society," "the wealth creators," the "job creators." The rest of the population is made up of moochers and freeloaders whose sense of "entitlement" is a burden on "free men." And according to their propaganda in line with the Ayn Rand script, it is not the corruption of Wall Street that is to blame for the financial collapse. It is merely the government meddling that is to blame. Instead of replacing and enforcing the removed regulations on the banks, the Ayn Rand psychopaths want to double-up on the deregulation.

"In September 2011, House Speaker John Boehner, mimicking John Gault of the novel, announced that the economy wasn't improving because 'job creators in America, basically, are on strike." He says that we must 'liberate' these powerful ones from taxes and an insane, meddling government--or else. If talent isn't treated the way talent wants to be treated, it will walk. Just try running your economy then.'

"Those who think they have something to look forward to in the libertarian future would do well to reread the famous scene in Atlas Shrugged where Rand illustrates the breakdown of society with a colossal train accident. Rand arranges this disaster in such a way that the crash is attributable not to some act of negligence by the railroad but to the arrogance of one of the train's passengers, a powerful politician who forces the train's crew to proceed into a dangerous tunnel.'

"And then, in a notorious passage, the narrator goes through all the other passenger cars on the train and tells us why each casualty-to-be deserves the fate that is coming to him or her. One of them, she points out, received government loans; another doesn't like businessmen; a third is married to a federal regulator; a fourth foolishly thinks she has a right to ride on a train even when she doesn't own the train in question. For each one of these subhumans, the sentence is death.'

"For a reader like me, Ayn Rand's almost total contempt for humanity is her most repugnant point. For the master spirits of our contemporary Right, though, I sometimes suspect that's the stuff that rings truest." Identification with the billionaire as a superior man, and deserved comeuppance for the humiliation and death of everyone else. "The game is finally up for the whiners of the world, they exult. . ."

This is the script of the Tea Party, of the Republican Party as it stands. It worships the God of the Market, a false idol, a laissez-faire utopia. "What they pine for is a system that can never exist, that has never existed, and that will never exist. And with every inch they bring us toward that ugly utopia, our society's deterioration accelerates."

"Inflexible dogmatism is, after sociopathic shrillness and fast trains, one of the great selling points of Atlas Shrugged. . .But the lastest Right doesn't so much simplify reality as idealize it. They're in a place where beliefs don't really have consequences, where premises are not to be checked, only repeated in a louder voice."

GROUNDHOG DAY AND SOMEWHERE IN TIME

2012-02-02T05:52:00.001-05:00

Well, it's Groundhog Day. Again. The earworms of the day are the soundtracks from the movies Groundhog Day and Somewhere In Time, particularly the Rachmaninoff 18th Variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. When Bill Murray's character, Phil, decides to improve himself, among other things he does is to take piano lessons, and this is the song he wants to learn.

Which makes you think he has seen the movie version of Somewhere In Time.

What a lovely theme it is!

Murray (as Phil) renders a jazz rendition on the George Fenton soundtrack, along with songs by Nat King Cole, Delbert McClinton, Ray Charles, and others. Every morning, he awakens to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe."

Wednesday's Critical Analysis: Megan Abbott's THE END OF EVERYTHING

2012-02-01T07:38:00.002-05:00

First of all, some warnings: this is not a review; this is an analysis. If you have not yet read this book, go to Largehearted Boy, link, see the author's soundtrack for the novel, and click on the links to reviews and interviews at the bottom.

And no matter what some other reviewers say, this is not a simple YA novel; it is not even a simple detective story about a search for a missing child; it is noir and a literary look at the darker side of the human condition. When you look into the abyss, it looks back at you and that should make you uncomfortable.

I passed on this book when it came out last year, though the initial reviews were good. Later, after it garnered so many outstanding reviews and award considerations, I earmarked it for reading in October, as a part of my Halloween horrorfest alongside Thomas H. Cook's Red Leaves and Stephen Dobyns' The Church of Dead Girls. I didn't get to it then, and Thanksgiving and the holiday season soon put me into a different reading paradigm.

I read it in January. The work I found myself comparing it to is Nanci Kincaid's marvelous As Hot As It Was You Ought To Thank Me, link, which I reviewed last year. Both novels are narrated by children on the cusp. Both novels involve a child and an adult who vanish mysteriously on the same day, inviting the worst speculations from the community. Both novels are adult and literary and psychological with insightful allusions and Edenic metaphorical symbols.

There are more similarities.

Both novels feature, at one point, a physical sexual situation between an adult and a child. Both authors risked melodrama for the sake of symbol by casting these respective adults as former saviors of their victims. These are cautionary scenes, to be sure, but graphic enough to be alarming and I think that both novels should have been edited better in this one regard. A few oblique nuances would have been enough. Heck, I think they give far too many sensational details on the six o'clock news too, any day of the week.

I also happen to prefer literary noir to graphic noir. That's me, but maybe not you.

Anyway, narrator Lizzie Hood and Evie Verver are thirteen-year-old best friends and neighbors. They're in flux, a state of change, moving between childhood and adulthood--doppelgangers, light and dark. Lizzie Hood is the more diffusely spiritual and virginal one, while Evie is an incarnation of Eve, the more carnal and darkly tempted, the one destined to fall.

The opening chapters are beautifully written, full of literary nuance and symbolic images that almost take your breath away. The likely suspects appear and possible plot threads are foreshadowed, some of them red herrings. The garden hose with its snout, the forked tongue, the blood dripping--sexual symbolism is everywhere. It is all too much for a thirteen-year-old girl to bear, and the author beautifully conveys this sense of being overwhelmed.

As the lush language and nuance drop away, you miss them, but then the plot thickens and it draws you in, convinced by then that this author must know where she's going and it probably won't be the usually cliched places.

The snake in the garden is Mr. Shaw, who knows that he's a snake, who can't help being a snake because that's what he is. Eve's perfect family falls from paradise because of her temptation. In her innocence, she gives herself to the snake, though we know that she is much too young to know what she is doing. Dark? Hell yes, it's dark.

Evie's sister Dusty appears as a Lilith character with an implied, suppressed sexual desire for their father that is Freudian--or perhaps super-Freudian. There is a twinning of father figures and daughter figures. This works on more than one level and makes much of Lizzie's early foreshadowing clearer, though you can take it or leave it depending on your own inclinations.

What happens is what always happens and continues to happen in life as well as myth. The snake self-destructs, but there are other snakes everywhere. Evie falls, losing innocence but gaining knowledge. Lizzie and Evie, once bound, now separate and hopefully move toward autonomy and adulthood.

The novel works on its various levels, as a mystery noir, as an Edenic parable, as a coming-of-age tale of olden days. Over at Largehearted Boy's blog, the author says that her first title for the novel was Nightswimming, which would have been suggestive of what lies beneath the surface here, the psychological rationalizations and projections.

Given the first edition dustjacket art and my interpretation of the novel, perhaps that would be the better title.

George Clooney Running, Kaui King, Kaui Hart Hemmings, And Love

2012-01-31T13:22:00.001-05:00

Native Kentuckian George Clooney was four years old when Kaui King, a son of Native Dancer destined to turn gray as he matured, won the Kentucky Derby in 1965.

Now a bit gray himself, Clooney can still run. In The Descendants, after he discovers that his wife may have been cheating on him, Clooney makes an emotional run to his neighbor's house, where he is going to try to either verify or discredit what his daughter has told him. This running scene is not in the book, though author Kaui Hart Hemmings achieves the same effect, with equal understatement and humor.

As Clooney's character, Matthew King, awakens to the truth, he also begins to awaken or reawaken to the nature of love and responsibility. It is a fine book and a fine movie, one in which the author was cast as King's secretary.

What we talk about when we talk about love depends upon our personal experience. Those Ayn Rand psychopaths incapable of love think that all lovers are simply faking it or else stupidly confusing love with pseudo-sentimentality and desire. Young love is often possessive love, an extension of the ego. Mature love is unconditional, as Shakespeare wrote of it in the sonnets, an unchanging love which does not alter when alteration is found.

Matthew King's run in the movie is in character, showing a man who has let himself go in important ways, a man who needs to catch up to himself and rediscover what is important in life. George Clooney plays it beautifully, but I doubt if Clooney himself is in such sad shape as some critics have suggested.

Even us old guys can run a bit, some of us. And some of us have learned how to love.

RUN LOLA RUN, ZOLA BUDD, AND TIME

2012-01-25T00:27:00.001-05:00

The old women exists in the young one and, at least as a potential, the young girl exists in the older, wiser woman. The child is the mother of the woman. All present in this visage.

The image of Zola Budd once flashed across the television screens of our minds, running barefoot, kitteny yet intense. Now she's older and wiser, yet I cannot read about her nor look at recent pictures of her without seeing the young girl there too.

We disagreed with her country's politics, we found her father authoritarian or despotic, but we didn't have it in us to think badly of kitteny Zola, who said she just wanted to run, without regard to money or medals.

In 1984, America's Olympic dream finished up the track after Zola's accidental clipping of heels with Mary Decker. The race is a slow motion replay, still repeating over and over, frozen forever in eternity.

Do we remember the winner? Heck, no. We only remember the tragedy hyped and suspended there, the possibly errant course of history, haunted by the lost potentials of the moment.

The eidetic imagery that appeared in the movie Run Lola Run also reminds me of Zola Budd. We pull for Lola as we once rooted for Zola, even though her family and love interest are flawed, involved with bad things. In the movie, Lola is given three shots at redemption for them.

Possibilities stretch out in all directions, but Lola learns to reflect on her previous errors in a world in which people do their best when kind, who learn gratitude through reflection toward empathy.

We can't control chance. What free will we have is really a free won't, as David Eagleman says. We can choose to react to situations with empathy instead of ego, to choose mercy over revenge. We can choose to be kind.

At the end of Run Zola Run, the immediate crisis is resolved, but things are still potentially dire. Her boyfriend is still a mule for the drug dealers, who are still in business. Just as at the end of It's A Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter still has the stolen money and he still has the upper hand.

This is the way of the world. We can't control the world, we can only control how we respond to it. We would hope to see that Lola talks her boyfriend into getting an honest job, and it's possible, but that isn't what this movie is about. Like Groundhog Day, Run Lola Run is about the choices we make every day.

Humorous Political Books

2012-01-24T10:23:00.002-05:00

Politics has never been funnier than in the current Republican primary. Adding to the hilarity, for me, is the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert stuff plus my tandem reading of Thomas Frank's PITY THE BILLIONAIRE and Jason Heller's TAFT: 2012.

I kid you not, in TAFT: 2012, President Taft disappears the day Woodrow Wilson takes office and reappears in the fall of 2011 and enters the Republican primary.

It is a semi-epistolary novel, full of memos and dispatches that are fun to read, given Taft's positions on trusts and foreign policy and the humorous juxtapostions. I had to go on line and look up Taft's history to see how much was genuine and I was amazed.

It is both funny and sad, but you might as well laugh.

Look For The New Cormac McCarthy Movie -- The Counselor

2012-01-18T17:06:00.005-05:00

In case you haven't heard, Cormac McCarthy sold his new screenplay, The Counselor, to the folks who brought us The Road and Tree of Life.

They're looking for financing now, but the details about the script so far indicate that it is to be another drug war film involving a lawyer, with two women in strong supporting roles.

I finally saw THE ROAD. They did a bland job of it. Robert Duvall is fine actor, but they should have left McCarthy's own dialog in the film. Instead, they paraphrased everything and it came out not only bland but pointless compared to the novel.

When Eli says that we'll all be better off when everyone's gone, the wonderful comic irony of the line is something you wouldn't think would be cut out of the movie. But it was.

In the book, the man and boy have very little. They have not yet come upon the cache of canned goods. They meet Eli who is more spiritual, funny, and threadbare than the Eli in the movie by far. They argue over whether they should give him any food or not. They finally decide on the reflective, human side and give him food and a blanket.

Then they are rewarded by karma or by God or by their own sub-consciousness. They find the cache.

The movie reverses the plot and ruins any such interpretation of the movie. And that isn't the only thing they got wrong.

I read the novel before it was published. My review of it then can still be read at Amazon--the spotlight review there--and it is the book that will linger forever in my mind.

Our Top To-Be-Read Shelf

2012-01-17T10:32:00.002-05:00

Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts by Steven Faulkner. Kent Craven reviews it at this link. Sounds like my kind of book.

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon S. Wolin. Recommended by Chris Hedges on C-Span.

Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Been meaning to read this one for years.

Shawn Green's The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness At 95 MPH. A transcendental fastball.
I have but have not yet read the uncorrected galleys of John Burdett's VULTURE PEAK and Geoff Dyer's ZONA. Burdett's series, always good, is continued.

Dyer is also the author of the beautifully written jazz memoir But Beautiful, the crazy brilliant D. H. Lawrence conjuring, Out of Sheer Rage, and other books I've quoted in this blog.

The subject of ZONA: A BOOK ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A JOURNEY TO A ROOM is the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, which I haven't seen yet but need to rent.

Possible tandem reads: Allison Krauss's A Man Walks Into A Room or Emma Donoghue's Room: A Novel. Perhaps even The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings. Plato's cave, maybe.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, I've been having fun reading all of the new books on consciousness, almost all of them written by well-qualified brain scientists. Besides the several I've read and listed on the best books list, I'm now reading Nicholas Humphrey's SOUL DUST: THE MAGIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

If I had to recommend only one of them, it would be David Eagleman's INCOGNITO: THE SECRET LIVES OF THE BRAIN. This book, along with my other reading, has shored up the way I look at free will (or free won't), and Eagleman has introduced me to several concepts I might have read somewhere but never took seriously before, such as "the Ulysses contract."

Free will seems to depend upon the circuitry in the prefrontal cortex, which is not yet developed in teenagers and never develops at all in some people.

Also new here:

Penelope Lively's How It All Began, a novel of interconnectedness, karma, the butterfly effect, a rose by whatever name you choose.

Sally Denton's The Plots Against The President: FDR, A Nation In Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. Glad to see this one from Denton, the author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy. She used to be a reporter in Lexington, Kentucky.

Paul Johnson's Socrates: A Man For Our Times. A keeper. I perused this when I first looked at it, was surprisingly drawn into it, so I sat down and read every word, cover to cover. Of course I'd read books on the Greeks before, but this one has a different slant. Highly recommended.

WIRE TO WIRE by Scott Sparling. I picked up this mystery/thriller after reading the review of it at Spinetingler Magazine. The author gives his soundtrack for the novel over at Largehearted Boy's blog at this link.

A New Literary Running/Jogging/Walking Blog

2012-01-17T08:28:00.000-05:00

Last year we had a feature called Mindfulness Monday where, among other things, we touted new running books and novels which feature a jogging protagonist. We dropped it like a New Year's resolution as the year went on, but what the heck, we've started it again in a brand new blog, meant to inspire while remarking on books, movies, and especially running soundtracks.

Here's the link.

Earworm of the Day: TODAY IS MINE written by Jerry Reed Hubbard, performed by Glen Campbell

2012-01-15T01:20:00.000-05:00

The real name of Jerry Reed was Jerry Reed Hubbard, singer, guitarist, actor, screenwriter, and composer. In films and on television, he often played the hick sidekick, as with Burt Reynolds in the Smokey and the Bandit movies. I used to have his song, "Amos Moses," on my running soundtrack back in the 1980s.

The Wikipedia profile for him is long and interesting but it doesn't mention what I think was by far his best and most beautiful song, "Today Is Mine," which was recorded by Glen Campbell on an early album. What a lovely song! Did its message of beauty and mindfulness keep it from becoming a hit?

(as recorded by Glen Campbell, from the album 'The Last Time I Saw Her')

When the sun came up this morning
I took the time to watch it rise
And as its beauty struck the darkness
From the sky

I thought how small and unimportant
All my troubles seem to be
And how lucky another day
Belongs to me

And as the sleepy world around me
Woke up to greet the day
All its silent beauty
Seemed to say

So what, my friend, if all your dreams
You haven't realized
Just look around you
You've got a new day to try

Chorus:
Today is mine, today is mine
To do with what I will
Today is mine
My own special cup to fill
To die a little that I might learn to live
To take from life that I might learn to give
Today is mine

Like most men I curse the present
Void of peace of mind
And race my thoughts beyond tomorrow
To envision there a sweeter time

But as I view this day around me
I can see the fool I've been
For today's the only garden
That we can tend

Repeat chorus.

Jerry Reed Hubbard died in 2008 at 71 years of age, but his song plays over and over in my mind--so you might say a part of him lives on right here.

Here's the Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5nUGCVDvzw

This Week's Tribute to the Book Cover: TIGER ART

2012-01-13T04:10:00.001-05:00

Of course, 2010 was the Year of the Tiger, yet book jackets featuring big cats in the title or in the cover art were abundant in 2011 too. We've already announced our 2011 Track of the Cat Award winners, but here are some of our favorites from the last two years:

Friday's Forgotten Book: LAND OF THE BLIND by Jess Walter

2012-01-06T06:26:00.003-05:00

This is one of those rare books of genre that not only entertained and amused me, it knocked me over. I reread this over the recent holidays, and my original take on it remains. Astonishingly well-written, laced with humor and insights. A little known gem of a book. It is a story within a story, a coming of age story within an unconventional murder mystery, a literary whodunit/whydunit/howdunit.

It is, on the surface, a story of the internet bubble and burst and the way it affected the lives of a couple of high school buddies over the course of their lives. This story is framed by a police procedural run by Detective Caroline Mabry, the protagonist of the author's previous murder mystery, Over Tumbled Graves.

But there is a deeper humanistic and compassionate level. In the second part of In Land Of The Blind, there is what I took to be an interesting riff on Blood Meridian (which is to say, on human nature and war) combined with a riff on Jean Sheperd's "Red Rider Nails the Cleveland Street Kid" which was adapted into the wonderful movie, Christmas Story. The kid protagonist is bullied and conscripted into a gang and made to fight another everyman, his nerdish and autistic doppelgänger named Eli, and both are drawn into a BB gun war. This is one of the best mini-parables of war to be found in a mystery novel, and the writing is consistently keen throughout the novel.

Eli, the protagonist's alter ego, is autistic (long before there was such a diagnosis). The author makes him a very empathetic character. After I closed this book, I immediately set about obtaining this award-winning author's entire works, and while nothing else quite measured up to this reading experience, any novel that appears with his name on it is now a must read. Jess Walter is on my list of authors talented enough to write the Great American Novel of this century.

Do yourself a favor and read this one.

Book Art of the Week: Kim McElvoy's "Night Run"

2012-01-02T23:48:00.000-05:00

Artist Kim McElvoy's poem, "Night Run" appears opposite her art, which shows the horses in the night surf, bringing to mind a powerful metaphor. Her blog can be found at this link.

My Favorite Versions of Auld Lang Syne and Other Music

2011-12-28T21:42:00.004-05:00

Scottish poet Robert Burns got the traditional part from an old man he once heard singing it, then he improved upon it, writing verses three and four. The part we like best is an ancient toast, then. We'll take a cup of kindness yet, for Auld Lang Syne.

The playlist below is simply grand, full of versions you'll want to play again and again.

1. I like to start off with John McDermott's very masculine version, in an Irish accent. Subdued and very deliberate, and then there is that lovely violin solo.

2. James Taylor. My favorite American version. Acoustic guitar and piano and laid back vocal.

3. Yo-Yo Ma's version, in duet with Chris Botti's muted trumpet. Botti draws the last notes out sadly, as if this were taps on a bugle. Yo-Yo Ma's track title is "Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace)," but the heart of it is Auld Lang Syne.

4. Manheim Steamroller plays it slowly, a chorus humming then singing in the background. Thoughtful and sad, it is. I think my wife and I could dance to this one.

5. Susan Boyle. I really like both this arrangement and Boyle's phrasing. For one thing, she contracts "my dear" into "m'dear," and it is very nice that way.

6. Guy Lombardo and Glenn Miller, two different big band versions of the traditional song you usually can't hear for the fireworks. Lombardo is given credit for making the song so popular in America. Icons fade in the popular memory, but the song of remembering goes on.

7. Dan Fogleberg. "Same Old Lang Syne," the same only very different.

8. Chris Issak. Another one I like a bit, although it is slow and quite short, using only one verse. And he says "my friend" instead of "my dear."

9. Kenny G. Another good one to slow dance to, or at least to move from side to side on a crowded dance floor. A sad saxophone. Seems to me I've heard it hundreds of times, but mostly at the end of Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne."

We drank a toast to innocence,
We drank a toast to now,
And tried to reach beyond the emptiness
But neither one knew how.

We drank a toast to innocence,
We drank a toast to time,
Reliving in our eloquence
Another 'Auld Lang Syne.'

10. A downloaded version sung by Susan McKeown will sound different to you in a good way. A splendid arrangement that sounds somehow traditional, even if it isn't.

11. Maria Carey. Disco, and very loud disco. Good for dancing, but not for singing or thinking about old times. It includes a countdown to midnight.

12. Marc Anthony or Bobby Darin. "Christmas Auld Lang Syne," which changes the lyrics entirely and makes the year revolve around Christmas and gratitude to God. Some other artists have covered this since, and I like it more every time I hear it.

When mistletoe and tinsel glow

Paint a yuletide valentine

Back home i go to those i know

For a christmas auld lang syne

13. I can't leave out the live version by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in duet. These two are both as dead as Jacob Marley, and their lively voices remind us that it was not so long ago that they were among us, and that it will not be so long until we are dead too. We need to remember that and to cherish each day like New Year's Day.

_______

Other music natural for New Year's Eve:

1. I Understand (Auld Lang Syne) by Herman's Hermits. A love unrequited song I liked when I was young. "Auld Lang Syne" is sung in the background as a counter melody and it works.

2. My Dear Acquaintance (A Happy New Year) by Peggy Lee. This is the older, experienced Peggy Lee, and she is a delight. Much my favorite version of this song.

3. My Dear Acquaintance (A Happy New Year) by Regina Spektor. This version features the sound of guns and warplanes in the background, giving the lyrics a less general meaning. In the last verse, she substitutes the word "young" for "kind," excluding those kindly but old. No matter; Spektor's little girl voice is a part of her charm. It's as if Spektor and and Janet Evancho got their voices switched somehow back at the factory.

My dear acquaintance
it's so good to know you,
the strength of your hand
that is loving and giving
and happy new year
with love overflowing
with joy in our hearts
for the blessed new year.

Raise your glass and we'll have a cheer
For all of us who are gathered here.
And happy new year to all that is living,
to all that is gentle, kind, and forgiving.

My dear acquaintance,
a happy new year!

Still Christmas Week: James Joyces' THE DEAD; Christmas Epiphany

2011-12-27T21:28:00.003-05:00

e·piph·a·ny (-pf-n)

n. pl. e·piph·a·nies

1. Epiphany

a. A Christian feast celebrating the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles as

represented by the Magi. Three Kings Day. The Twelth Day. Also, Twelth Night, the Eve

before the Twelfth Day according to some traditions.

b. January 6, on which this feast is traditionally observed.

2. A revelatory manifestation of a divine being.

3. a. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.

b. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization, as with the

Buddha's enlightenment..

Here in the United States, when Christmas falls on Sunday as in this year, we also take Monday as a holiday. Most businesses stay closed, just as most opened up today, Tuesday. But not everyone is done with Christmas yet.

The first day of Christmas, as in the song, was Monday, also called Boxing Day and the Feast of St. Stephen, when your love provides a partridge in a pear tree, and when the snow lays round about, deep and crisp and even, and when Good King Wenceslas traditionally plays Good Samaritan.

The Feast of the Epiphany does not come until January 6th of the New Year. James Joyce's "The Dead" takes place on this day in 1904 at a party in Dublin. It is a dinner party, a gathering of family and friends not unlike our own gatherings in any year, a mix of people of different ages whose capacity for love and empathy has evolved to different degrees.

The original story is easy to find on-line, and there is a published play of it, and John Huston's excellent movie adaptation has been on television this season. Most people enjoy the music associated with the story. You can hear Susan McKeown's excellent rendition of "The Lass of Aughrim" at this youtube link.

The rather egotistical main protagonist has arranged a special romantic interlude with his wife for this holiday, his wife played in the movie by Angelica Houston. When Houston's character hears that particular song, it triggers her memory of her first love. A bit later, as the couple are preparing for bed, she confesses her sorrowful memory of that lost love to her husband, which spoils the mood for their lovemaking but creates an epiphany in the protagonist.

Readers differ greatly in their interpretation of this, but a lot of Joyce scholars think that the lady was regreting the loss of her own child which was the result of a connection with her dead lover. No other reason is given for her admission into a convent in her youth. Whether the child died in a miscarriage or was given up or lost for some other reason is a bit beside the point.

The protagonist, hearing her story, feels pity for his wife for the first time, and perhaps for the first time loves her with a love that is not possessive but rather empathetic, an unconditional love not based upon sexual gratification or physical appearence.

Joyce expands the metaphor at the end of the story, and in the film this is given in a voiceover. Again, different readers interpret this differently, depending on their own ideas about epiphanies, awakenings, and the meaning of the title. You'll have to decide for yourself.

Some scholars have pointed out that this story is autobiographical, and surely it is, but like all great authors, Joyce parlayed his own experience into the symbolically universal.

Christmas Spirit Stays On: Connie Willis' "Adaptation"

2011-12-27T16:24:00.003-05:00

After Musing about the different adaptations of Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL on the holiday, I took Connie Willis' Miracle and Other Christmas Stories down from the shelf and reread her very excellent story entitled "Adaptation."

The story begins with an epigraph from Sir Walter Scott's Christmas poem, Marmion:

Heap on more wood, the wind is chill;
But let it whistle where it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

The male protagonist, a clerk in a bookstore, narrates the story in the first person. He begins by detailing the various adaptations of A Christmas Carol that the store carries, and the various commercial ways that the original story has been exploited.

The protagonist is a book lover, and we take it that he cares about literature and is a bit miffed by the public clamoring for cheap imitations and showy materialism. His wife left him and and has remarried up, and she has custody of their daughter. As the story opens, he is looking forward to her visit on Christmas Eve. This is complicated by the surprise visit to the store of a best selling author, signing copies of his book, How To Make Money Hand Over Fist.

How to spend quality time with his daughter? That's the question, now fraught with uncertainty due to the manipulations of his boss, the store owner, the flippant attitude of the visiting author, and the constant fluctuation of his ex-wife's own holiday plans, which take precedence over his own.

The store hires temporary help to assist him with the autographing session and until the holiday. He sees them as the Spirits of Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. He thinks that they are there to turn the visiting author, a grasping materialist. But they're not, as he finally sees at the end of the story--they are there to help him.

In this story, as with It's A Wonderful Life, the materialistic Mr. Potters of the world get their way, again and again, many of them giving lip service to religion, monetary pillars in the church expecting to buy redemption.

But we should not sink to their level.

Instead, we should have the will to maintain good cheer and the spirit of giving and gratitude, no matter what. We can usually be about as happy as we make up their minds to be. We find a way through adaptation. The guiding examples are there in the classics of our literature, including Scrooge's nephew, Fred, in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

And that Christmas Spirit is always there to remind us of what we can do everyday, throughout the year.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge

2011-12-25T11:57:00.004-05:00

We watched "It's A Wonderful Life," this week, which ends with wheelchair bound Mr. Potter/Dick Cheney again getting the best of the "chumps" trying to give their fellow men a helping hand.

To jump or not to jump, the question that is coldly reprised after a fashion in Cormac McCarthy's SUNSET LIMITED, is again settled here because George Bailey realizes that, even if he loses his material possessions, even if he goes to jail, he still would not lose the capacity to love, that love makes life worth living, even if the greedy, power-hungry psychopaths and war-profiteers--like Mr. Potter--win again and again.

We also watched Ralphie in CHRISTMAS STORY, and THE REF and THE ICE HARVEST. And we caught the George C. Scott version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Like most of the adaptations, they added here and subtracted there. It rather amazes me that they took out two of the best lines in Dickens' original text:

Scrooge refuses to be wished a merry Christmas and says to his nephew, "What right have you to be merry? You're poor enough."

To which his nephew responds, "What right have you to be miserable? You're rich enough."

Christmas is commercialized, perverted so that it even sanctions greed and war. The real lesson is that even in the face of all of this phony horror in tinsel, the attitude of gratitude and love itself redeem each day, including this one.

A toast: Peace on earth and good will toward men, even to the Dick Cheneys and Newt Gingriches and Mr. Potters, and especially to those deluded and manipulated by them.

BEST NON-FICTION OF THE YEAR 2011

2011-12-24T02:36:00.007-05:00

Some of the most significant non-fiction books published this year concerned consciousness and free will. David Eagleman, whose comic and cosmic Tales of the Afterlives was one of my favorites last year, soared even higher in my estimation with INCOGNITO: THE SECRET LIVES OF THE BRAIN.

I also read and admired Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, Julian Baggini's The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self, and Michael S. Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain.

Gazzaniga says that free will only occurs in an individual's relationship with others, which of course is what the classics of literature have been telling us all along. Free will only develops with empathy. Ego-driven Man is a slave to his own fears and desires.

During the year, I enjoyed Charlie Rose's continuing series of interviews with brain scientists, as well as his interviews with physicists such as Lisa Randall, author of Knocking On Heaven's Door. I also read The Four Percent Universe by Richard Pansk, The Fabric of Reality by Brian Greene, and The Book of Universes by John D. Barrow.
________

This year's Most Remarkable Tandem Read Award goes to the duo of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Rick James' Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence.

________

Another significant book this year shook us into a new icy awareness. Jon Ronson's THE PSYCHOPATH TEST was an enlightening read, pointing out that many of those in power are biologically psychopathic, unable to feel empathy, manipulating all of those around them for self-serving ends. This was certainly one of the best books of the year.

Other important books included Lawrence Lessig's Republic, Lost; Barry Estatrod's Tomatoland; and Robert H. Frank's The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.
________

The Non-fiction Most Fun To Read Award 2011 goes to:

Jonathan Lethem's THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE. A hearty collection of sharp insights and humor. There are 437 pages of miscellaneous Lethem items, including an interview with Bob Dylan, insightful ideas about Philip K. Dick (whose new book he helped edit), reviews of music, books, and movies, and random humorous pieces. A few weeks ago, I blogged about his essay on postmodernism and Liberty Valance--at this link..

The runner-up was Grant Morrison's surprising Super Gods, rather astonishing to this reader for its depth, wit, and humanism. I'm certainly not into comics, but Morrison ties well known comic icons with universal myth and offers sound psychological insights into the communal culture that touches us all.
________

The Best Anthology of the Year: DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, nicely edited by Declan Burke. A collection of sparkling essays and short fictional pieces commenting on the nature of Irish crime fiction, often very literary and insightful and always entertaining.

The runner-up anthology in this category was Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns, edited by John P. Avlon.

Best Memoir By An Author 2011: Tim Parks' reluctantly transcendental TEACH US TO SIT STILL. Honorable mentions go to Pat Conroy's My Reading Life and to Katharine Weber's The Memory of All That, both excellent.

Best Memoir By A Musician: JUDY BLUE EYES by Judy Collins. Honest and interesting. It gives me a deeper understanding of the music of the time. I read it in October and reviewed it with my other Halloween reading. I also reread the late Suze Rotolo's memoir then.

Both Collins and Rotolo talked about the abortions they had back when it was still illegal. I thought about them again this month when reading Hillary Jordon's novel, When She Woke.

Best Memoir By An Actor: THE GARNER FILES by James Garner. I've read many interviews with the man but never understood his argument with Warner Brothers until I read this one. He was helped on this book by Jon Winokur, editor of Zen To Go and The Portable Curmudgeon, books I'm glad to have in my personal library.

Best Memoir By A Film Critic: LIFE ITSELF by Roger Ebert.

Best Novels of the Year 2011

2011-12-20T06:07:00.010-05:00

The Best Novel of the Year was Alex Shakar's LUMINARIUM, which is a hell of a story and smartly technological, neurological, and metaphysical at the same time, the big ideas in witty, sharply written prose.

Good tandem reads were this year's The Spiritual Doorway In The Brain: A Neurologist's Search For The God Experience by Kevin Nelson, M.D., and last year's My Stroke Of Insight by Harvard scientist Jill Bolte Taylor.

Luminarium was also my year's Best Book About Brothers, with Patrick Dewitt's darkly humorous western, The Sisters Brothers, runner-up in this category.

Best Literary Westerns of the Year: Susan Froderberg's OLD BORDER ROAD, Craig Johnson's HELL IS EMPTY, Patrick Dewitt's THE SISTERS BROTHERS, and Denis Johnson's TRAIN DREAMS.

Best Literary Mystery/Thrillers of the Year: Craig Johnson's cross-genre HELL IS EMPTY (which is also a runner-up for the Track of the Cat Award), and Declan Burke's dark and funny ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. A longer descriptive list of the year's ten best crime novels will appear here later this week.

The Best Time Travel Novels of the year 2011, from a banner crop, were: Stephen King's 11/22/63, Felix J. Palma's THE MAP OF TIME, and Thomas Mullen's splendid thriller, THE REVISIONISTS.

These three reminded me of all the great time travel novels and movies: Jack Finney's best work and the Back to the Future trilogy, Richard Matheson's Somewhere In Time, Audrey
Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, and several other good ones dealing with time and fate.

The one anachronism I noted in Stephen King's novel was when the gatekeeper calls the protagonist the "mf" epithet, this in 1958. That ugly term did not enter common vernacular until a few years later when Richard Pryor and some other comedians started using it. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think so.

Perhaps it was merely a clue that the drunken gatekeeper of the rabbit hole (who reminds me of Shakespeare's gate porter in MacBeth) is an out-of-time character. Later, the protagonist talks with another gatekeeper whose name is something like a play on Auld Lang Syne.

These three time travel books are not to be missed. A Map of Time also reminds me a bit of the movie Time After Time, starring Mary Steenburgen and Michael McDowell, as H. G. Wells.

And speaking of H. G. Wells, the Best Biographical Novel of the Year goes, hands down, to David Lodge's A MAN OF PARTS. Lodge illuminates the darker, sexier, least known parts of Wells' biography with an informed and well-imagined light. The runner-up in this category was Ann Napolitano's novel, A Good Hard Look, which featured events in the life of Flannery O'Connor.

This year's Track of the Cat Award, going to the best literary work featuring a big cat in a symbolic way (fiction or creative non-fiction) goes to Tea Obreht's elegant fable, THE TIGER'S WIFE. A worthy book to rank with the stellar past winners in this category such as Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, and last year's The Tiger by John Vaillant. HELL IS EMPTY takes second-place here in this category.

Obreht's novel is chock full of animals, and just as you might say that the book's real literary familiar is Kipling, the literary familiar for Johnson's Hell Is Empty is Dante.

I read three fine novels by Irish author Alan Glynn this year: WINTERLAND/THE DARK FIELDS/BLOODLAND. The Dark Fields was made into the movie, Unlimited, which I also reviewed a while back. Winterland and Bloodland share some of the same characters, so I suppose yet another ----land novel is in the works, making a trilogy. Bloodland has been named Irish novel of the year and deservedly so, but there were so many excellent Irish crime novels this year that a dozen of them each could have won it.

The Best Civil War Fiction Award goes to William S. Kerr's THE SHIELD THAT FELL FROM HEAVEN, a novel of ideas which presents a creative alternate view of the generally accepted political lay of the land.

The Best CountryNoir/SouthernGothic/BlueCollar Story Fiction Awards go to VOLT: STORIES by Alan Heathcock, THE OUTLAW ALBUM: STORIES by Daniel Woodrell, and CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA: STORIES by Frank Bill.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach won for Best Baseball Novel of the Year.

Contending novels worthy of mention here include Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga, the author of the wildly comic and worthy Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger. A bit too wordy in this one, but Adiga again demonstrates his grasp of situational power politics with a keen sense of human nature, illustrated with off-edge comic irony. Recommended.

Another solid entry was Jim Harrison's The Great Leader. On the surface, Harrison's flawed Janus-faced protagonist chases his own shadow/animal self. I loved its inspired nuances and little quirky moments, all of which add up to the usually great Harrison novel. Read Pete Dexter's funny review of it at this link. But I liked it much more than he did.

You might seek out Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party, which was touted as Blood Meridian-like. I loved it, though it is not nearly as deep (nor as dark) as McCarthy's masterpiece. It is similar in surface plot, attitude, punctuation, dialogue, cadence, and vocabulary, though not in philosophy nor symbolism and it is based upon an entirely different history. I'll review it at length one of these days, when the mood strikes me to read it again.

Most novels being compared to Cormac McCarthy are no such thing, of course.

Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone and other good ones, when asked (in this interview) about the reviews which compare him to Cormac McCarthy, replied:

"Well, I've certainly read and admired Cormac. However, the books that influenced him also influenced some of the rest of us who are always getting hit with that 'sounds like Cormac' thing. I've read Shakespeare and the Bible and Hemingway and Faulkner as well, and so if that means I have echoes that sound like Cormac it doesn't necessarily mean it comes from Cormac. It comes from the original source. I don't think I'm that much like him, to be honest, but it does come up a lot."

There are two other novels I've recently read that are especially worth mentioning. Both of them would have made my best lists if I'd been lucky enough to read them when they first came out. The first is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which brims with spacey humor and lovely poetic turns of phrase. The second is Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil, which I passed on last year, probably because it was a trade paperback and I wanted to read it in hardcover.

These two are not to be missed in any format, both of them charming, insightful novels. Detailed reviews of them are not hard to find, but with these, the less you know ahead of time, the better.

This year's winner in the general Best Book Art category was Felix J. Palma's novel, THE MAP OF TIME, dustjacket, frontispiece, title page, and choice of fonts.

The Best Dustjacket or Cover Art of the Year winner was Patrick Dewitt's comic western, THE SISTERS BROTHERS, which has to be seen in person to be fully appreciated. Runner-up here is Adiga's Last Man In Tower.

Christmas Eve: My selections of the year's best non-fiction are at this link..

Friday's Forgotten Book: Martha Grimes' JERUSALEM INN

2011-12-09T11:03:00.003-05:00

Today's Friday's Forgotten Book is one I've posted about before, Martha Grimes' Jerusalem Inn, one that I like to revist during the Christmas season.

This is certainly a genre novel, one of her long-running series published more than a quarter of a century ago back in 1984. I love the way this book opens, the cinematic feel of it, the images which invite interpretation:

"A meeting in a graveyard. That was how it would always come back to him, and without any sense of irony at all - that a meeting in a graveyard did not foreshadow the permanence he was after. Snow mounding the sundial. Sparrows quarreling in the hedges. The black cat sitting enthroned in the dry birdbath. Slivers of memories. A broken mirror. Bad luck, Jury.'

"It was on a windy December day, with only five of them left until Christmas, that Jury saw the sparrows quarreling in a nearby hedge as he stood looking through the gates of Washington Old Hall. The sparrows--one attempting to escape, the other in hot pursuit--flew from hedge to tree to hedge. The pecking of one had bloodied the breast of the other. He was used to scenes of carnage; still he was shocked. But didn't it go on everywhere? He tracked their flight from tree to hedge and finally to the ground at his feet. He moved to break up the fight, but they were off again, off and away.

"The place was closed, so he trudges about the old village of Washington in the snow now turning to rain. After three o'clock, so the pubs were closed, worse luck. Up one village lane, he found himself outside the Catholic church. Feeling sorry for yourself, Jury? No kith, no kin, no wife, no . . . Well, but it is Christmas, his kinder self answered.

"This depressing debate with himself continued, like the fighting sparrows, as he heaved upon the heavy door of the church, walked quietly into the vestibule, only to find he'd interrupted a christening in the nave. The priest still intoned but the faces of the baby's parents turned toward the intruder and the baby cried.

"His nasty sparrow self cackled. You nit. Jury pretended to be in a brown study before the church bulletin board, as if it were important to convey to the people down there that the information posted here was absolutely necessary for his salvation. Nodding curtly (as if they care, you clod!) at nothing, he turned and left. Unborn again.

"That sparrow self was with him in the church cemetery, sitting on his shoulder, pecking his ear to a bloody pulp, telling him that no one had forced him to accept his cousin's whining invitation to come to them at Christmas ("But we never see you, Richard. . ."). Newcastle-upon-Tyne. What a bloody awful place in the winter. A nice walk among the gravestones, that's what you need, Jury. And in the snow, too. Peck, peck, peck, peck.
That was when he saw her."
______

His meeting with the woman in the graveyard is then beautifully described. They talk casually for a long while, and she invites him for a drink at her place, which is nearby. Grimes gives this an entirely natural feel as her characters become genuinely interested in each other, each with the growing prospect of a surprisingly wonderful holiday ahead of them. The reader is rooting for them to get together, and indeed it looks as if they will. But then the last sentence of the first chapter is,

"The next time he saw her she was dead."

Well, what did you expect? This is genre fiction. It follows a formula. The perpetual loner, Richard Jury, now has personal reasons for investigating the case, even though he is away on vacation. We know the theme, but each genre novelist gives us a different variation upon it, and hopefully a creative one.

This book involves death--this is a murder mystery after all--but there is also a pregnant woman at the Inn and symbols of rebirth. The year dies but a new one is reborn. Life, death, rebirth, and always the potential for love and the milk of human kindness. A mystery for the season.

Cover Picture of the Month: Jack Sorenson's COWBOY CHRISTMAS EVE

2011-12-06T13:47:00.002-05:00

One of the sad things behind the diminishing of the printed novel is the parallel reduction in printed book covers and dustjackets. Less books, less book art. But there is yet plenty of great art around.

Artist Jack Sorenson has long made his living by his western art, being widely featured in print and magazine articles over the years. This month his "Cowboy Christmas Eve" is the featured art on the cover of Western Horseman Magazine. His prints can be found at many on-line institutions across the web including Elegant Horse Pictures at this link. His original art can be found at the Joe Wade Fine Art Gallery in Sante Fe. Here's the link.

Native American Lore: Egerton R. Young's Algonquin Indian Tales

2011-11-30T11:12:00.003-05:00

Today is the last day of November, which is Native American Heritage Month.

This last week we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade which had the annual float presented by the Oneida Nation, though it seemed multi-tribal, featuring New York Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain, of the Winnebago/Ho-Chunk tradition.

Todd Mason, at this link, collected last week's Friday's Forgotten Books which were to feature Canadian authors, and I missed my chance to then blog about one of my favorites, Egerton R. Young's Algonquin Indian Tales.

Young wrote with insight about collected American Indian lore and he also wrote tales about his own experiences in the Canadian north. Jack London based the dogs in his own marvelous work of fiction, The Call of the Wild, upon those featured in Young's autobiographical work, My Dogs in the Northland. The sled dogs in the movie, Eight Below, seemed to reflect both works in the names of the dogs (see my review at Amazon, link).

I suspect that Native American traditions get more accurate play in American fiction today than ever before, at least compared to earlier mainstream novels and movies.

Tony Hillerman, Margaret Coel, James D. Doss, and a few other sharp novelists have crafted mystery series involving American Indian characters in a generally accurate and sympathic fashion. Not to mention what many literary novelists such as Louise Erdrich and Jim Harrison have done.

Cormac McCarthy As Ransom Stoddard; Jonathan Lethem's Postmodernism As Liberty Valance

2011-11-28T02:35:00.005-05:00

Among the many delights of Jonathan Lethem's new book, The Ecstasy of Influence, is a comic philosophical essay entitled "Postmodernism As Liberty Valance."

Lethem says, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely," namely, the relationship between modernism, high modernism, and postmodernism. And more.

"The chewy center of TMWSLV is a gunfight. A man (Jimmy Stewart/Stoddard) stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man (Lee Marvin/Liberty Valance). The victim--for this is, technically, murder--represents chaos and anxiety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkillable." After his death, the witnesses lavish praise on the killer (Stewart/Stoddard) and put him up for public office.

Not all praise him--his political opponents denounce him for shooting a leading citizen (Marvin/Valance) down in the streets. Hearing this preys on Stoddard's conscience (despite the obvious self-defense rationale) and he considers withdrawing his candidacy until John Wayne/Tom Doniphon explains to him that he did not actually kill Valance, that he (Wayne/Doniphon) shot him with a rifle from an alley where he was hidden from sight. Stoddard then gets back into the race and becomes a successful politician.

"The film allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity to the form of the lawbooks and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable)."

Before giving us his own interpretation of the film, Lethem presents several definitions of postmodernism from several critics, which of course vary since no one seems to agree on exactly what it is.

"...the avowed, self-declared postmodernist school of U. S. fiction writers: Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, John Hawkes, and a few others, many of them one another's friends, and many of them influential teachers. . .This clan, when Barth and Pynchon were scooping up major prizes, rode high enough that they seemed worth knocking down. This is the epoch John Gardner tilted against in On Moral Fiction.'

"True, this tribe once had the effrontery to imagine itself the center of interest in U. S. fiction, but if you still hold that grudge your memory for effrontery is too long. To go on potshotting at these gentlemen is not so much shooting fish in a barrel as it is shooting novelists who rode a barrel over Niagara Falls twenty or thirty years ago. Or the equivalent of the Republican Party running its presidential candidates against the memory of George McGovern. (Of course, both are done routinely.) We'll call these guys Those Guys. . .'

"I'd like to suggest that the killing of Liberty Valance in order to preserve safety and order in the literary town is a recurrent ritual, a ritual convulsion of literary-critical convention. The chastening of Those Guys, and the replacement of their irresponsible use of Free Power with a more modest and morally serious minimalist aesthetic sometime in the late '70s, was a kind of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a point of inception for the ritual.'

"Who first played the role of Stewart/Stoddard, the true-of-heart citizen shoved into the street to take on the menacing intruder? Was it Raymond Carver? I think Raymond Carver might have been the original man who shot Liberty Valance. Who's played the role recently? A few: Alice Munro, William Trevor, Cormac McCarthy..."

In Lethem's interpretation, John Wayne represents the critic who sets up the author of high modernism to stand against the low-life postmodernist Liberty Valance, order versus chaos. Lethem's arguments are witty, much more involved, and run several pages--you should grab his new book and read it all.

I'd now like to offer my own take on his take. Cormac McCarthy is indeed a classical author who represents high modernism well. I don't see Those Guys as much different from McCarthy, especially since Lethem includes Pynchon as one of them. I do see the divide between High Art and low art, and I am content to let Charlie Sheen, late of 2 1/2 Men, represent low art, chaos, superficial id-dominated ego.

In my interpretation, looking only at this trinity in the story and not the other parts, John Wayne/Doniphon would represent, not just literary critics, but the entire population of readers who have learned to appreciate High Art, the domain of human universals, of empathy, compassion, of true love rather than self-aggrandizing possession.

To go back and use the body, mind, and spirit analogy in the original story, Lee Marvin/Liberty Valance is the id-dominated body, Jimmy Stewart/Ransom Stoddard is the mind-dominated one, and John Wayne/Doniphon is the super-ego dominated spirit guide in this trinity.

Or, if you prefer, Liberty Valance is a laissez-faire Republican; Stoddard's a bleeding-heart liberal Democrat; Doniphon's an independent existentialist/libertarian and the more evolved man.

I previously discussed Dorothy Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" at this link.

Friday's Forgotten Book: LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR by Judith Rossner

2011-11-25T13:43:00.001-05:00

Charlie Rose interviewed Diane Keaton this past week, as Keaton is promoting her new memoir, Then Again, which I also read earlier this month. Keaton starred in the 1977 movie version of today's Forgotten Book: Judith Rossner's novel, Looking For Mr. Goodbar.

The book, a noir crime novel, became a best seller in its day but never achieved the critical respect I think it deserves. The movie also had a great soundtrack, as dead as disco these days. The movie is now out of print in VHS and not yet released on DVD or Blu-ray.

The book reveals the killer first thing, making the flashback plot about how we got from point A to point Z. The movie keeps you in suspense until the very end. Until then, the movie audience believes that any of the men in the story might be capable of killing her on any given night.

Judith Rossner based the novel on the real New York murder of a school teacher by a man she met at a single's bar. Her protagonist is crippled when young, scarred by her experience. As a result of the disease, her spine is crooked, though when her naked body is seen from the front, her twisted nature does not show. Symbolic.

Keaton plays her beautifully, perhaps even naturally. She's a material girl. Movie-goers at the time might have said a liberated woman, but the picture below/right is telling. She is addicted to material things, to smoke and to drink and to the pleasures of promiscuous sex. Hedonistic, you might say; I say, a materialist at odds with the spiritual and humanist side of her nature. She tries to fill her emptiness with material things, but it is a bottomless void, a hungry ghost.

She is constantly after more, in pursuit of some greater thrill that will fill the emptiness inside her briefly, until the addiction cries out for more again. Or until she finally destroys herself, which of course she does.

Keaton hardly mentions Looking For Mr. Goodbar in her new memoir. Of course she won the Academy Award that year for her performance in another movie, Annie Hall. How much of Diane Keaton was in the characters she played in her movies? Charlie Rose asked her that, but I don't think that Keaton knows herself well enough to say.

She sometimes teeters on the edge between then and again, but always falls off on the ambitious materialist side, quoting Cher on the importance of young good looks; and choosing men--Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino--because, she says, "Talent is so damn attractive." Yet she allows that she has misgivings and would do some things differently could she do them again.

If so, I'd like to think that she would choose love over anything--over talent, over good looks, over money, over career advancement. But there's the rub. She says that she "never found a home in the arms of a man" because she chooses her career over love and everything else, time and time again. And, at age 65, she claims that it is too late to find love.

Little does she know.

Anyway, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the 1975 novel, is still a splendid piece of noir. And if you haven't yet seen the movie, do yourself a favor and find it somewhere.

The Best Thanksgiving Story - Thanks to Richard Russo and Stephen King

2011-11-23T09:18:00.001-05:00

This is a Thanksgiving story you no doubt missed, but one that you'll be delighted to read.

It comes to you by way of The Best American Short Stories of the Year 2007, selected by Stephen King. The story itself is entitled "Horseman," and was written by Richard Russo. It begins with part of a nursery rhyme from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses:

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the moon is high,
All night long through the dark and wet
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then,
By he comes back at the gallop again.

The poem easily adapts into a song, and Shawn Colvin has recorded a version of it with just those words. The poem becomes an earworm for the protagonist, a graduate student, after her husband begins reading it to their child every night. We aren't told her interpretation of the poem, but in the first paragraph we're told that this earworm runs through her mind even when she is jogging in the woods behind her New England college, making her as melancholy as if she were "jogging not through the woods but through an endless cemetery."

End of paragraph one.

It is two days before Thanksgiving, with the bare November tree branches swaying all over campus, the nearest branch "scratching insistently, like a memory" against the protagonist's office window.

The protagonist is confronting one of her male comp students whom she has caught in flagrant plagiarism. She shows him the evidence, and he responds like a belligerent jerk. It is a beautifully written scene. We see her mixed feelings, but we also see her restraint, despite the macho arrogance of the student.

"A moment before she had been feeling both anger and self-righteousness. These were easy, unambiguous emotions to which, in the present circumstance, she felt entitled.'

"She was angry, and rightly so, that students cheated more often in her classes than in those of her male colleagues, just as they were more often tardy, more openly questioning of her authority, and more often gave her a mediocre evaluation at the end of each term. Even worse, the fact that they held her to a higher standard was unwitting. Had anyone asked them if they were prejudiced against their female professors, not one would have answered yes. Hooked up to a lie detector, every one of them would pass."

The story then goes into italicized flashback, with the protagonist being confronted by her professor. A parallel situation in a way yet nothing of the sort, as the professor is only criticising her for being too withdrawn, too formal in her writing, for not putting enough of herself, of her own passion, into her work. Although this only makes her angry at the time, eventually she comes to see the truth of it, that she has distanced herself--not only from work but from other people as well.

We see her transform through her reading, as well as through her contacts with other professors and students, all of them flawed in their own ways. She decides to avoid condemning the plagiarist and instead she gives him another opportunity to write his own essay, a chance to redeem himself. We don't see how it turns out. Perhaps the student is just going through an adolescent phase and will learn better, or perhaps he is a psychopath who cannot be reformed. No matter. The teacher tries to do her job; she tries to teach him rather than punish him.

She reconsiders empathy; she reconsiders forgiveness; she reconsiders gratitude. She even invites a lonely obnoxious old professor to have Thanksgiving at her house with her family.

The story has a hopeful ending. It is a parable, but unlike so many parables that we see on television during the holiday season, this one seems less sentimental and more real, truer to life itself. You should read it yourself; my synopsis of it here does not do it complete justice.

There is a flashback in her memories to a beautiful scene at a bar where the professors take turns nominating the greatest lyric poem ever written. When it is her professor's turn, he recites Stevenson's "Windy Nights," the poem above. When asked for an explanation, he replies, "Because when I speak those words aloud, my father is alive again."

This professor also recognizes that literature gives us the chance to see what life is like for someone else. What it feels like. Literature. Life.

An appendix to the volume gives each author a chance to comment on the writing of his selected story, and Richard Russo's comments must be read. He says that the protagonist is loosely based upon a fellow academic, a woman who was smart and attractive, but also "guarded in the extreme, the way academics can be."

"In the language of Star Trek, she'd diverted all power to her shields, which was probably why I was so startled one night when I saw her with her defenses down. . ."

"It came to me--slowly, the way these things do--that she was like many academics I'd observed over the years. You'd think that the life of the mind, especially the liberal arts, would make us better if not happier people. But too often it doesn't. The study of literature had what I believed to be a salutary effect on my own character, making me less self-conscious and vain, more empathic and imaginative, maybe even kinder.'

"Perhaps it's an oversimplification, but as I've gotten older I've come to wonder if this is what reading all those great books is really for--to engender and promote charity. Sure, literature entertains and instructs, but to what end if not compassion?"

Indeed. Happy Thanksgiving!

Let Us Be Thankful for Stephen King Today 11/22/2011

2011-11-22T00:27:00.005-05:00

Search Google to find some lists of the best Thanksgiving movies. The darkly humorous comedy, The House of Yes, appears on many of those lists, though it has little to do with Thanksgiving. It does have to do with an obsession with a Thanksgiving time, in particular the Thanksgiving of 1963 when the country reeled with JFK's assassination and its immediate aftermath.

Where is the past? Long gone, or at least stuck at that particular grid of space/time while all those reading this have moved on. In Stephen King's new one, 11/22/63, he uses time travel and the assassination as devices in an epic novel about the nature and relative importance of history, destiny, casualty, memory, moral responsibility, and love.

It also incorporates some of the author's personal history, in an artsy way, and I'd have to say that it is my favorite Stephen King, though I'm always prejudiced toward the last Stephen King I have read for that honor. I tend to overread them, but that's my perogative as a reader. It scarcely matters what King consciously had in mind.

We share some of the same memories, King and I, and many of his songs are my songs. King's protagonist delivers his own soundtrack in this novel which travels back to 1958 and then waits for an opportunity to change history for the better. Or can it be changed? And if it is changed, will it be better?

You should read this one even if you've read many of the other novels that involve similar time leaps--Stanley Shapiro's A Time to Remember, say, or Barry Malzberg's The Destruction of the Temple. Some of the other related works are at this link.

After finishing the book, I came on line to read the reviews and the interviews with King, talking about this novel. I'd advise you to do the same, and sooner rather than later. We should all be thankful for each moment, especially for each moment we have to share with loved ones.

Life turns on a dime.

Thanksgiving for Two

2011-11-18T10:23:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving is a time for families, and most Thanksgiving movies are of families reuniting around the holiday feast. There are exceptions, like the memorable Thanksgiving I mentioned earlier this month in the original movie of Sweet November.

But I suspect that there are many couples celebrating Thanksgiving together, just two adults separated from the rest of their families by military service or work situations.

My heart goes out to any couples separated by such situations, but they'll find that the love in their hearts will endure.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Stephen Greenleaf's BLOOD TYPE

2011-11-18T09:25:00.001-05:00

"Among other things, I'm a drinking man. Not an alcoholic, mind you--I don't imbibe until I pass out, or go on weekend benders, or wake with the shakes and shivers, or lose blocks of time in which I've done things I'm ashamed of when apprised of them--but I do take a drink most nights of the week.'

"I like the places my mind visits when it's been primed with a half-dozen ounces of scotch and I like the person I become when my congenital tethers are loosened up a bit--I'm friendlier and funnier in such a state, less prone to the charms of gloom and doom. That I've been able to stay a drinking man rather than descending into a drunk is due less to my character than to my genes, the experts tell me..."

"In my experience, drunks are arrogant, assertive, and antagonistic; drunks are loud, lewd, and lecherous; drunks are dumb, dull, and demoralizing. Drunks demand excessive sympathy and dole out excessive blame. Drunks love the bottle more than they love themselves, and themselves more than they love anything else but the bottle. If my only alternatives were to spend my time surrounded by drunks or give up drinking altogether, my choice would be the latter. Luckily, there is a third option, which is to find a drinking man's bar..."

A description of the bar follows, and a description of the drinking crowd that gathers there. One night Tanner's closest friend among them begins to relate his troubles with his wife, a torch singer at one of San Francisco's high-priced nightclubs. She is apparently having an affair with Richard Sands, a married, rich, corporate raider who has become enchanted with her singing. Tanner's friend turns up dead, and Tanner is drawn into an investigation of his death.

That's basically Stephen Greenleaf's opening, but he does it beautifully, with charming off-hand empathy. We either identify with Tanner or have empathy with him in his description of the siren call of the bottle. He drinks almost every night, but he honestly doesn't see his drinking as a problem or even as an addiction. He recognizes his problems, all right--for instance, he hasn't been able to deeply love a woman, nor to live by a commitment, in thirty years of drinking. But he doesn't see any connection between his restless sense of emptiness and his drinking.

This is a very subtle sleight of hand, which makes the novel worth reading again and again, closely. Greenleaf is more aware than his protagonist, much aware of the "siren songs" of addiction. Like Greenleaf himself was then, the protagonist is an ex-lawyer, filled with disgust for lawyers. At the time of this novel, the first Gulf war is going on, and Tanner watches it on television and comments about it as the case unfolds.

Tanner bats from the left side and tells it like he sees it: "Switched from CNN to ABC. Learned the Supreme Court had just decided to allow coerced confessions to be used against criminal defendants. Fixed another drink. Thought about the demise of the once proud court. . .In this brave new world, the Constitution is less a bill of rights than a bill of lading..."

This is a detective yarn with Ross MacDonald-like twists, a conspiracy novel written in an endearingly intelligent voice that remains fresh every time I read it. It is satisfying on all levels and understatedly psychological. It comments on the politics of our time with asides of social criticism appearing here and there like comic relief. Its deepest themes are played with empathy and humanism, for those with ears to hear them.

I blogged about Stephen Greenleaf earlier in the year. This marvelous novel is out-of-print, but used copies were available at Amazon last time I checked.

Greenleaf changed publishers several times but could not find a formula for commercial success, in spite of his high critical reception. Dustin Hoffman once bought the rights to The Ditto List, a stand-alone novel, but the movie did not get made and Hollywood never came calling about his smart Tanner detective series. Greenleaf reluctantly quit fiction and went back to being a lawyer.

You can read an interview with him at this link.

The Fall Hunt, Hunter's Moon, Seeking Enlightenment,

2011-11-17T13:35:00.000-05:00

Closing in on the last quarter of the Hunter's Moon.

The middle of November is a time for hunting stories, dog stories, nature stories. The hunting or tracking yarns often are simply quest or self-discovery stories told with universal symbols and featuring a meditation or reassessment of our true divided nature. First we hunt for sustenance, then we hunt for enlightenment.

We sense the fall naturally. The days get short. There is an invigorating zip in the air. The middle of November can be a time for Indian summer, it can be either unseasonably warm or unseasonably cold, and often it brings the first tracking snow, at least here in these Kentucky woods.

Much of my annual November reading returns to my consciousness unbidden much like yearly holiday carols, earworms for the season. Jack London passages committed to memory long ago. Robert Frost: Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.

Last year at this time, in the weeks before starting this blog, I went on a tour of nature-related reading, with a few of the many books that use the cat as a symbol of our animal nature. Such works as:

Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Track of the Cat and Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard:

Caught in Fading Light: Mountain Lions, Zen Masters, and Wild Nature by Gary Thorp. The author goes on a quest to see a cougar in the wild. He seems to be more of a formal Buddhist than either Jim Harrison or Gary Snyder. A smaller book and a lighter read than the others here.

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs.  The strikingly beautiful picture of a cougar in the snow graces the dustjacket. Childs is a great story-teller.

The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America by David Baron.  On the first edition, it carries the same dustjacket picture as The Animal Dialogues but stylized and darker.

Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion, edited by Susan Ewing and Elizabeth Grossman. A treasure-chest of essays on the elusive cat (lion/panther/puma) quest, including Pam Houston's "Looking For Abbey's Lion."

Water Witches by Chris Bohjalian. A fine ghostly catamount quest novel (among other things) that I read in first edition long ago.  The epigraph is from Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." About the frozen leopard found high in the mythical house of God. "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."

I greatly prefer hunting stories with a sense of reverence for nature, a sense of gratitude.  As I've said before, I think that fall is the ideal time for Halloween with its recognition of death, the nightmare before the winter solstice and, for many of us, the rebirth of Christmas. In between, in this country, we celebrate Thanksgiving, our national day of gratitude.

This is as it should be.

Monday's Books in Brief

2011-11-14T23:01:00.002-05:00

I'm thankful for many more new books than there is time to review in depth here. My compliments to:

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga, the author of the wildly comic and worthy Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger. A bit too wordy in this one, but Adiga again demonstrates his grasp of situational power politics with a keen sense of human nature, illustrated with off-edge comic irony. Recommended.

Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. I've hardly begun this one yet and may review it at length later. There are 437 pages of miscellaneous Lethem items, including an interview with Bob Dylan, reviews of music, books, and movies, and random humorous pieces. A keeper, no doubt.

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson, nicely edited by Jann Wenner. We caught Johnny Depp doing his terrific imitation of Thompson last week on television too. A natural.

Novelist Katharine Weber's interesting memoir, The Memory Of All That, especially for the sections concerning Cole Porter, but as a former member of Readerville, I know the lady is somehow related to nearly everyone. Six degrees of separation from Katharine Weber, we used to say. She writes beautifully.

Jim Harrison's The Great Leader. On the surface, Harrison's flawed protagonist chases his own shadow/animal self. I loved its inspired nuances and little quirky moments, all of which add up to the usually great Harrison novel. Read Pete Dexter's funny review of it at this link. But I liked it much more than he did.

Mark Bowden's Worm: The First Digital World War. The author of Black Hawk Down is always worth reading. Crazy hacking terrorists.

Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party, which was touted as Blood Meridian-like. I loved it, though it is not nearly as deep (nor as dark) as McCarthy's masterpiece. It is similar in surface plot, attitude, punctuation, dialogue, cadence, and vocabulary, though not in philosophy nor symbolism and it is based upon an entirely different history. I'll review it at length one of these days, when the mood strikes me to read it again.

Most novels being compared to Cormac McCarthy are no such thing, of course.

Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone and other good ones, when asked (in this interview) about the reviews which compare him to Cormac McCarthy, replied:

There are two other books I've recently that are especially worth mentioning. Both of them would have made my best lists if I'd been lucky enough to read them when they first came out. The first is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which brims with spacey humor and lovely poetic turns of phrase. The second is Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil, which I passed on last year, probably because it was a trade paperback and I wanted to read it in hardcover.

These two are not to be missed in any format, both of them charming, insightful novels. Detailed reviews of them are not hard to find, but with these, the less you know ahead of time, the better.

Chris Hedges vs. Christopher Hitchens: On the Ten Commandments

2011-11-13T03:38:00.004-05:00

You. Who are on the road. Must have a code. That you can live by. --"-Teach Your Children," Crosby Stills, Nash, and Young

In Christopher Hitchens' newly published collection of essays, entitled Arguable, one nine-page essay is devoted to the idea that the Ten Commandments include no such code. Allowing only a fundamentalist interpretation to argue against, the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything wastes no time in dismissing the first commandments.

Hitchens says that Thou shalt have no other gods before me only implies that God is jealous and that there are other gods to worship, and that Thou shall not make a graven image "appears to forbid representational art." Hitchens gives us no enlarged discussion of false idols but instead allows only a minimalist, fundamentalist interpretation.

Chris Hedges, on the other hand--in his book, Losing Moses On The Freeway--takes a secular approach. He sees the Ten Commandments as a guide to the way we should live, here on this material road. To Hedges, God is love, a spiritual force rather than the material god that Hitchens argues against. Hedges sees Americans errantly placing material riches above spiritual love, worshiping the almighty dollar, bowing to the gods of money, power, and celebrity. False idols.

"It is the unmentioned fear of death and obliteration, the one that rattles with the wind through the heavy branches of the trees outside, which frightens us most, even though we do not name this fear. It is death we are fleeing. The smallness of our lives, the transitory nature of existence, the inevitable road to old age, are what idols tell us we can avoid."

We lose ourselves to the addiction to material things in an effort to seek control over death. The more we obtain, the more we covet in a futile effort to fill the bottomless emptiness inside. If only we had a different car, or a different house, or a different spouse. Or we try to escape into drink and drugs, subordinating our free will to animal compulsions. "These impulses, carefully manipulated, intoxicate us with patriotic fervor and a lust for war. They lead us to support certain candidates or to buy certain products or brands.'

"Politicians, advertisers, social scientists, television evangelists, the news media, and the entertainment industry--all have learned what makes us respond. It works.'

"We follow the idol and barter away our freedom. We place our identity and our hopes in the hands of the idol. We believe we need the idol to define ourselves, to determine our worth. We invest in the idol. We sell ourselves into bondage."

Hedges says, "The commandments are guideposts. They bring us back, even as we stray, as we all do, to the right path. They are our protection against the siren calls of glory, wealth, and power..." those illusionary idols that take us away from what is real and eternal. Love itself.

Friday’s Forgotten Book: SOME DEATHS BEFORE DYING by Peter Dickinson

2011-11-11T08:24:00.006-05:00

Happy Veterans Day to fellow veterans out there, especially to you grizzled old conscripts who risked your lives or at least gave up a goodly chunk of your youth mostly as a result of the lies, blunders, and self-serving interests of politicians in step with the demagogues’ drumming of jingoistic propaganda all around you.

Peter Dickinson’s Some Deaths Before Dying concerns the lingering damage done to some veterans of World War II. It is an English murder mystery--that is to say, a drawing room mystery, a puzzle. It is also a period piece of a very different time and place, manners and customs having greatly changed over the last fifty years.

The story is told in the third person but from rotating perspectives.

Mostly paralyzed and hence bedridden, 90-year-old Rachel Matson discovers that one of a set of dueling pistols that she gave long ago to her now dead husband is missing, having turned up on television on the Antiques Roadshow.

With the help of her nurse, she seeks out the mystery and discovers other mysteries unsought in a marvelously plotted novel that reminded me of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time.

Under the surface story, the novel is a reflection on time, which we experience differently at different moments.

Time speeds up as we get older, and the meanings of the past take on a parallex view. Although not all of the characters in this novel are old, this novel also qualifies as geezer lit, blessed with Peter Dickinson's well aged asides and insights into human nature.

I prefer the American mystery to the English mystery, but now I may have to give some of Peter Dickinson's earlier works a try.

Tom Waits' "I'M THE LAST LEAF ON THE TREE": An Analysis

2011-11-09T05:45:00.000-05:00

There's a wonderful Charlie Brown comic where Snoopy watches a lone leaf fall toward the ground. Well, the first falling leaf of the season, he thinks. The first leaf to make the courageous leap! The first leaf to depart from home! The first brave leaf to plunge into the unknown. As he walks away, another thought comes to him: The first leaf to die.

The fall season is well-named. Fall is the end of the life cycle, the dying of the light, the twilight of our days before we are kicked out of paradise, in a metaphorical and biblical sense.

This song, like Waits' "November," is a last stand against the darkness. It is a positive thinking, a reaffirmation of life and consciousness that, by the end, becomes ethereal: If they cut down the tree, I'll show up in a song.

I'm the last leaf on the tree
The autumn took the rest
but they won't take me.
I'm the last leaf on the tree.

When the autumn wind blows
they've already gone.
They flutter to the ground
cause they can't hang on.
There's nothing in the world
that I ain't seen.
I greet all the new ones
that are coming in green.
I'm the last leaf on the tree.

The autumn took the rest
but they won't take me.
I'm the last leaf on the tree.
They say I got staying power
here on the tree.
I've been here since Eisenhower
and I've outlived even he.
I'm the last leaf on the tree.

The autumn took the rest
but they won't take me.
I'm the last leaf on the tree.
I fight off the snow.
I fight off the hail.
Nothing makes me go.
I'm like some vestigial tail.

I'll be here through eternity
if you want to know how long.
If they cut down this tree
I'll show up in a song.
I'm the last leaf on the tree.

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson

2011-11-08T23:50:00.003-05:00

Earlier this week, Joan Baez and Kris Kristofferson sang in duet as the closing act of the David Letterman Show. They're on tour together in November. She's 70 and he's 75.

Baez was Bob Dylan's love interest in competition with Suze Rotolo, whose book I read again after posting about it here last week. I didn't realize then that Rotolo had died earlier this year. When I discovered that, just this week, I felt an immediate sense of loss--illogical, I know, but there just the same.

She is survived by her husband and a son. Rotolo married the love of her life after the sixties ended, in 1970, her one marriage lasting the forty years until her death. She dedicated her memoir to her son, Luca, "so he will know" and to her husband, Enzo, "who always did."

Listen to her now, from her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin' Time:
"In these times, seeing Bob Dylan's life and work and the people he was close to documented or fictionalized on film, on display in museum exhibits and other commemorations in all categories, only intensifies the feeling I have of possessing a parallel life. It is an odd sensation to see myself on the screen, under glass, and written about in books, forever enshrined and entombed alongside the Legend of Bob Dylan.'

"When I look at the pictures and hear the songs I also see and hear the story behind them. A still photograph morphs into a home movie and a scrawl on a page evokes a scene in a room or on a street. I hear a laugh coming from somewhere off to the side...'

"It has taken me many years top allow my parallel lives to converge. But there will always be a space between the image and the reality because ghosts live there and they cannot be contained under glass. . .Life goes on for those who live it in the present.'

"I see history as a reliquary--a container where relics are kept and displayed for contemplation. So much has been written about the sixties that the more distant those years become, the more mythic the tales and the times seem to be. Facts and statistics are pliable. Truth and accuracy are truly Rashomon-like. Each story is true from the teller's perspective; the weight shifts.'

"My decision to add my relics was not an easy one. Hindsight meddles with memory, after all, so the best I can do in writing about those long-ago years is to try to make them recognizable."

Rotolo certainly inspired many of Bob Dylan's best songs, perhaps including "I Threw It All Away."

I once held her
in my arms
She said that she'd always stay.
But I was cruel,
I treated her like a fool.
I threw it all away.

Once I had mountains
in the palm of my hand
and rivers that ran through
every day.
I must have been mad.
I never knew what I had.
I threw it all away.

Love is all there is
that makes the world go round.
Love and only love,
it can't be denied.
No matter what you think about it,
you just can't learn to live without it.
Take a tip from one who's tried.

So If you find someone
who gives you all of their love.
Take it to your heart,
don't let it stray.
Cause one thing for certain:
You will surely be a-hurtin
if you throw it all away.
Like I threw it all away.

Tuesday's Forgotten Film: SWEET NOVEMBER, with Sandy Dennis

2011-11-08T15:33:00.000-05:00

Forget the remake. The original 1968 movie, Sweet November, is the forgotten classic to see. A Thanksgiving movie too.

Sandy Dennis is perfect for the Bohemian Sara, whose hobby is to reform mankind, one man at a time, a man a month.

Anthony Newley plays the workaholic owner of a box business. A chance meeting with Sandy Dennis results in an offer for a month affair, to begin on the first of November and end at midnight on the 30th.

Newley is physically attracted to her, and desires her as a conquest. He thinks that maybe a week of sex with her will do fine. He arranges for his office to send him a telegram at her address so that he might get away cleanly, but when the telegram arrives, he decides to stay on. Of course, he begins to fall in love with her.

It turns out that Sandy Dennis has men fall in love with her every month. She pulls this role off nicely. This was her best movie and it stands the test of time. Sentimental? A tear-jerker? Well, yes, but the movie tells deep universal truths, and one is that we are all temporary in this vale. We should all live life as if it were a thing borrowed, to quote Marcus Aurelius, and live in the moment, be thankful for each day, yet another day in paradise.

We should love truly, madly, deeply, all we can while we can. True love is not selfish and possessive. It lets go when it is best to let go. When lovers part, true love continues on. When one spouse dies or we die, we live on in them and they in us. As Pulitzer Prize winning author Douglas Hofstadter says, love can become kind of mind meld for lovers who share their lives over many years.

Sweet November is just a delightful movie, very unrealistic in particular but very true in parable. It is a romantic comedy with one of the best Thanksgiving scenes ever, before or since. Watch it this month with someone you love.

THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2011, edited by Harlan Coben

2011-11-06T01:27:00.000-04:00

Otto Penzler controls this series, and he assigns a different editor every year. Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Ed McBain, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and several other giants of crime fiction have accepted the job over the years.

First is the standard short foreword by Penzler, warning those who regard a mystery as a detective story that the wider criteria for selections in this series is: Any story in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or plot. As simple as that.

Next is the comic introduction by Harlen Coben:

"I hate this part.'

"You should skip it. I'm serious. You know what this is, don't you? This is the part of the story collection where the editor faux-deep, pseudo-erudite essay on the larger meaning of the short story. It is, quite frankly, an irrelevant exercise.'

"The collection is about the story, not my view of it, and thus this introduction becomes the literary equivalent of a bad overture at a musical: It gets you in your seat, but if you're already seated, you just want the curtain to open. It stalls. It annoys. Even the best introductions, no matter how well done, are a bit like a toupee. It may be a good toupee. It may be a bad toupee. But it is still a toupee.'

"It is also pretty ironic when you think about it--an excess of words to introduce a form which relies on the economy of them.'

"A novel is a long-term commitment. A short story is more like a heady fling--intense, adventurous, emotionally charged, and, when I was young, embarrassingly quick. Okay, forget that last one. The best short stories, like those high-octane lovers, never fully leave you. They burn, linger, haunt. Some sneak up on you in a subtle way. Others are like a punch in the gut--sudden, spontaneous. They knock the wind out of you."

Harlan Coben then elaborates on the Elmore Leonard axiom, about leaving out the parts that readers tend to skip. Coben's introduction falls into that category of novel periphery, the comic anti-introduction introduction (foreword, preface), of which I recall several shining examples.

One of these is in John Lancester's The Debt to Pleasure, in which the pseudo-author chooses to write his preface before the book is written because:

"...we are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone--weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic--shared by ship captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their vessels aground, and by authors composing forewords."

After Harlan Coben, we could have used a table of contents, but it isn't here. Instead, there are the stories. In the back of the book, there are brief biographies of the contributors, most of them well known, with the author's story notes often included. There is also a list of "Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2010" that for one reason or another, didn't make the final cut.

This turned out to be the best collection in years, for which I am thankful to Mr. Penzler, Mr. Coben, the authors of the stories here themselves--and thankful to those who continue to support them. Highly recommended.

NOVEMBER, as sung by Tom Waits

2011-11-05T09:49:00.002-04:00

Fall is the last stage of the year, a metaphor for the twilight of our lives. As the days get shorter, there is an awareness of the growing darkness. All of our classics ring in tune with this metaphor.

This song, like "Last Leaf" on his new CD, is a song of resisting death, of not going gently into the night, of raging against the dying of the light. A rough one here, not only a last stand but a last gasp.

Tom Waits' voice was not at its best when he recorded this one, and it may take a while for you to see the effective plea of the song itself, so human.

Dying people aware of their state, resisting approaching death and engaged in a gallant fight, resisting rather than simply quitting. Death of the body, the animal self. And to whom is the last sentence addressed?.
_______

No shadow no stars
no moon no cars
November
it only believes
in a pile of dead leaves
and a moon
that's the color of bone

No prayers for November
to linger longer
stick your spoon in the wall
we'll slaughter them all

November has tied me
to an old dead tree
get word to April
to rescue me

November's cold chain
made of wet boots and rain
and shiny black ravens
on chimney smoke lanes
November seems odd
you're my firing squad
November

With my hair slicked back
with carrion shellac
with the blood from a pheasant
and the bone from a hare
tied to the branches
of a roebuck stag
left to wave in the timber
like a buck shot flag

Go away you rainsnout
go away blow your brains out
November

Friday's Forgotten Book: CRY ME A RIVER by T. R. Pearson

2011-11-04T21:18:00.003-04:00

Today's Forgotten Book is Cry Me A River.

The title of this murder mystery refers to the 1953 song sung by Julie London. The first time you hear it, you think it is too slow. It crawls, it slinks, it takes forever to get anywhere. Your mind wants to race ahead, but the music pulls you back, a smokey melody that winds and drifts and will not be hurried.

The narrative of the novel is like that. It rambles, circles, eddies, and takes its good ole time. Events happen quickly but you're not certain whether these are meaningful or simply asides, for the thrust of the main narrative is in no particular hurry. The story here will have to sink into you over time, over the course of the full novel.

And the prose structure matches the overall narrative. It is not a Faulkner imitation; it is Pearson's own, a natural southern country cadence but one that takes some getting used to, and like me, you're apt to find it delicious once you get an ear for it.

Despite Hollywood's typecasting, we know that many southerners talk fast, and my wife is a prime example. Actress Jean Smartt, who lately appeared as the DA on television's Harry's Law, is another example, and she would have no problem doing the audio book for this novel.

No matter how quickly you hear it spoken, the narrative may strike you as slow, beat-around-the-bush circumvention, and I know several readers who gave up on the book early for that reason. You have to get into the story as it lays, you have to see the beauty in such circling narrative progression. The narrative and the story become one big river with interesting undercurrents.

On its gabby, rolling surface, this is a crime novel, a police procedural of one policeman's investigation of the death of another policeman. The hidden undercurrents provide the color, the humorous characters, the quirky dark life of a small community. It ends in a redemption of love and empathy if you've the eyes to see it.

This brilliant work deserves a wider audience.

Incidentally, the title of the song, "Cry Me A River," became a catch-phrase back in the 1950s, a repartee remark to someone complaining about their relatively insignificant troubles. The song was covered by many other torch singers and blues artists and is now a standard.

I recall first listening to Diana Krall's rendition, which made me think of Julie London. With her slow tempos, Diana Krall put the crawl in almost every song she sung back then. I became an instant fan. Recently NPR interviewed Tom Waits about his new CD (link) and Terry Gross determined that Waits' song, "Kiss Me Like A Stranger" was inspired from Julie London's "Cry Me A River."

No doubt the song has influenced other musical artists and other novels as well.

"The fire's dying out. All the embers have been spent outside on the street. Lovers hide in the shadows. You look at me. I look at you. There's only one thing I want you to do. Kiss me. I want you to kiss me like a stranger once again. Kiss me like a stranger...".

Halloween, Red Riding Hood Again, All Soul's Day, November, Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Day

2011-11-03T02:12:00.001-04:00

Hey, Halloween isn't over until all the candy's gone. Pumpkins still grin out from porches. The October light still lingers.

I had a more difficult time identifying the costumes this year, not hip to all of the popular characters on television these days. An ordinarily attired lad walked up to the door and held his box out for candy. When asked, he said he was dressed up as a fisherman, his costume apparel consisting of a common fishing ball cap and the small fishing rod he was carrying. First time I'd heard of that one.

I blogged about the Red Riding Hood legend the other day, at this link, and I was delighted to see one couple playing the part better than any other I could find, even with a net search. Not only did Kris and Tracy help to brighten Halloween for us, but Oreo and Gremlin got into the spirit as well.

A lot of ghostly stories take place after Halloween, in November, including a number of detective novels about solving murders that happened on Halloween night. Then too, there are all those other holidays on this week's international calendar, especially those connected to the Gunpowder Plot, a la MacBeth.

One of the best of these is R. D. Wingfield's detective novel, Hard Frost. The murder takes place on Halloween and the novel spans the time from Halloween to Guy Fawkes day. Wingfield's quirky detective, Jack Frost, is not politically correct but he is magnificently funny going up against the Bureaucracy and trying to do the right thing in spite of it. He is flawed but endearingly so, a bit like Colombo of old.

Another good mystery set in November is Stephen Dobyns' Saratoga Haunting, which pushes genre just a bit and is one of the best of the series. Dobyns' straight-laced Charlie Bradshaw is balanced by the cynical, wise-cracking Victor Plotz, his assistant in this one and a central character in novels which came later.

Dobyns hasn't published a mystery novel in a long time, and I surely do miss reading about his characters.

I think the dustjacket illustration on the first edition is great too:

Halloween Reading; ALIEN and ALIENS: NO EXIT

2011-10-31T04:06:00.002-04:00

Listen to Stephen King, from Danse Macabre:

"Much of the sex in horror fiction is deeply involved in power tripping; it's sex based upon relationships where one partner is largely in control of the other; sex which almost inevitably leads to some bad end."

"I refer you, for instance, to Alien, where the two women are presented in perfectly nonsexist terms until the climax, where Sigourney Weaver must battle the terrible interstellar hitchhiker that has even managed to board her tiny space lifeboat. During this final battle, Ms. Weaver is dressed in bikini panties and a thin T-shirt, every inch the woman, and at this point interchangeable with any of Dracula's victims in the Hammer cycle of films in the sixties. The point seems to be, 'The girl was all right until she got undressed.'"

And in a footnote at the bottom of the page, King says:

"I thought that there was another extremely sexist interlude in Alien, one that disappoints on a plot level no matter how you feel about women's ability as compared to men's. The Sigourney Weaver character, who is presented as tough-minded and heroic up to that point, steps out of character at the scriptwriter's whim by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say...'Isn't that just like a woman?'"

That was written circa 1980 and times have changed, of course, but it seems to me that he was stereotyping the men in the audience. I'm a man and I think I would have gone after the cat as well, and I don't think less of the character for doing so. But King raises some points worth discussing.

I recall enjoying that entire movie, especially the end segment, and the part where she stripped down to her panties heightened the tension, made her more vulnerable. Movies (and novels) do this all the time either in symbol or in narrative. Such scenes are appeals to the animal side of us, and our animal side is a part of the human condition--and hence a part of our Art. We can deny it and suppress it, but it is still there.

Sigourney Weaver's part is indelible because it is like the part of Sally Fields in Norma Rae. She is the individual against the monster, and that monster has its obvious twin in the Bureaucracy.

Like comic relief, such scenes seem to me worthy components of our literature, if accomplished either in metaphor or as non-melodramatic and essential parts of the plot.

The fact that she ultimately survives--she and symbolic cat alone--is a more significant signal of her abilities than the fact that she spent some time looking for the cat--which, to this member of the audience, suggested in a literary way that she was getting herself together, gathering up that part of herself that wanted to hide from the monster rather than face it.

Should we be embarrassed about nudity in art in general, or about enjoying that vision of Sigourney Weaver in her undies in this particular work of Art?

I don't think so. The driving force in the original Alien--and in such sequels as B. K. Evenson's novelization of Aliens: No Exit--is always the Individual's stance against Bureaucracy, humanity against the psychopaths. I wish some of them were better written, but I really admire their pillorying of corporate corruption on behalf of the existentialist, labor, and the powerless mass.

Speaking of beauty, I read Judy Collins' new memoir this week, and it is grand. A personal history of a musical great and her time.

The lady is frank about her sexual exploration when young. Always something of a liberated woman, she saw the nudity on her album cover as a positive thing then, and she sees it that way now. In a recent interview, the Denver Post asked her to name her greatest accomplishment. "Being with the same man for the last thirty-three years," she said. In her book she says that she has never cheated on him and has continued to love him entirely, eternally, always.

B. K. Evenson, by the way, knows something of the evils of bureaucracy first-hand. A Mormon himself, he was the author of The Open Curtain, which was critical of some of the Mormon Church's historical policies. He was also the author of some Cormac McCarthy crit-lit before his writing cost him his job at Brigham Young University. According to the notes of Aliens: No Exit, he then became the director of the Creative Writing Program at Brown University.

Sunday's Halloween Eve Ramblings

2011-10-31T01:33:00.004-04:00

Well, for teenagers, Halloween weekend is an excuse to throw a party, usually rumored in advance to become what we used to call a make-out party, which meant what our parents called necking. I'm not sure what they would call it today, but whatever it is, it likely won't be nearly as innocent.

There used to be the occasional hayride too, the parties and hayrides always turning out to be better chaperoned than you had imagined. Still, a chance for fun and romance.

The Sunday morning comics today were full of Halloween. Hi & Lois found his old vampire costume. He put it on and imitated Dracula for his kid--who considered him lame, of course. Hi says to his wife, I thought kids today were into vampires. Lois says, not their father's vampires. The next scene shows a kid looking like the vampire hero in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.

Also today, Dennis the Menace decides that kids in adorable costumes get more candy than those in scary costumes. There is truth in that assumption. And so now teenagers prefer the sexier bad boy costumes, and I suppose that too is only natural.

We listened to this week's Garrison Keillor Show today, which usually touches on Halloween during October. This show's highlight was a cover of Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" sung by Stephanie Davis and GK himself. Lovely song the way they sing it.

If a couple were to appear at our door at Halloween today as a young Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, would anyone recognize them? Grandparents, maybe. Or great-grandparents. I read Judy Collins' new autobiography this week. Mighty fine it is, with much about Dylan and the other singers of that era.

This evening we watched Masterpiece Mystery's last adaptation of Kate Atkinson's quirky circling mysteries, the last and best part ending fittingly at Christmas time. The music throughout the three novel/movies was American country/folk in keeping with the musical preferences of her protagonist detective.

Thanks to the olderthanelvis blog for a rundown of the soundtrack, here:

The Case Histories Soundtrack:Case Histories, part 1
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 1
Iris DeMent — Let the Mystery Be
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Nanci Griffith — Speed of the Sound of Loneliness
Lucinda Williams — Sweet Old World
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss — Your Long Journey Home

Case Histories, part 2
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 2
Iris DeMent — I'll Take My Sorrows Straight
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
Iris DeMent — Trouble

One Good Turn, part 1
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 3
Lucinda Williams — Bus to Baton Rouge
Eliza Gilkyson — Calm Before The Storm
Public Enemy — Fight the Power
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
Eliza Gilkyson — When You Walk On

One Good Turn, part 2
TRACKLIST - EPISODE 4
Kylie Minogue — 2 Hearts
Lucinda Williams — Blue
Eliza Gilkyson — Calm Before the Storm
Gillian Welch — Paperwings

When Will There Be Good News? part 1
EPISODE 5 - TRACKLIST
Zero 7 — Destiny
Lori McKenna — Drinkin' Problem
Doris Day — Let It Snow
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings

When Will There Be Good News? part 2
EPISODE 6 - TRACKLIST
Mary Gauthier — Mercy Now
Gillian Welch — Paper Wings
Kris Delmhorst — Since You Went Away
Joan as Police Woman — The Magic
The xx — Vcr
Macy Gray — Winter Wonderland

Atkinson's detective gets beat around more than any other detective in memory since James Rockford in The Rockford Files. And Rockford fans, don't miss J. Kingston Pierce's terrific new interview with James Garner, at this link.
___________________

The gang of black clouds
that had slipped into town under cover of darkness
now loitered on the horizon like unemployed ghosts,
impatient already for the night
when they could begin their Halloween pranks.

The lightning from the night before
now hangs upside down in the mountains
like a recharging bat,
waiting out the day in electric slumber.

Below, a scavenger wind runs the frosted fields,
ribbed and mangy and terribly lonesome
for its buddy the bat up there,
snoring sparks in the tree limbs..."

--Ken Kesey, Sometimes A Great Notion

Grimm, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Earworms of the Day

2011-10-29T23:12:00.006-04:00

Last night we watched the new television crime show/fantasy entitled Grimm, thematically linked to Grimm's Fairy Tales, and last night's episode featured Red Riding Hood. It was symbolic/literary and darkly quirky funny and we laughed out loud a few times. A child's tale made adult fare.

It opened with a jogger listening to "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics on her I-Pod when she is violently attacked and killed. Two policemen investigating the case comment on the song, which later gives the killer away when he is humming it. The song is later reprised in the Marilyn Manson version, which turns some of the lyrics grisly and into the first person point of view of the killer.

Back when it first came out, I used to use the Eurythmics version as a part of my jogging soundtracks, but once they started playing Marilyn Manson's version of it, I could no longer abide the song, which is just too creepy. See Wikipedia's explanation of it at this link.

Still, this was only a Halloween show, just in fun; and, as Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre, Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde and the mythic wolfman are the same thing, they represent animal side of human nature. In Grimm, some of the wolfmen have the free will to change. Though constantly tempted, they refrain from eating people, always in recovery like reformed alcoholics.

Another earworm today is "Lil Red Riding Hood," by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. It too takes the point of view of the wolf, but in this version, Red Riding Hood is not a child but a mature woman. The object of this old-fashioned wolf, as in the wolf whistle of that time, has never been rape and murder, but simply seduction. In those innocent days, that was considered bad enough. Bad. Baaad. I mean, baaaad.

I still like the music today as it rattles around in my head, even though the lyrics bump into accrued political correctness and the constant self-admonition that wolves were never my thing, not even on Halloween.

The next song is Warren Zevon's "Werewolves In London," link, with its own driving piano and wolfish howls. It is overtly the most violent of the three songs named here, but at least the story is told in the third person. More violent but less creepy. And comic book violence too, more darkly funny than chilling.

My mind goes back to the Freudian and literary analysis of the Red Riding Hood legend. See:

Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.

James Whitcomb Riley Mamie's Little Red Riding Hood, told like Uncle Remus.

The politically correct version of Little Red Riding Hood.

Wickipedia Red Riding Hood.

The next earworm is "The Highwayman," first by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. An existential reincarnation song of sorts.

Then the lovely romantic version of the Alfred Noyes poem sung by Loreena McKennitt. If you've never heard this one, you're missing something special. Not a party song, this is one that needs close attention, so that when she sings the ta-ta-tlot, ta-ta-tlot softly, you can imagine the hoofbeats in the distance.

As far as Halloween costumes go, the highwayman has always been much more my style than the wolfman. I've always been clean-shaven but I've always worn my hair a bit long, enough so that I would be obliged to forgo the french cocked-hat of the costume, as they are usually designed for someone with a smaller head or with less hair. Besides, I'm cocky enough.

Not that we're dressing up for Halloween these days, but if we did, I'd settle for the rear end of this horse costume, just as long as my sweet wife is up front.

Happy Halloween!

Friday's Forgotten Book: THE GHOST HUNTERS by Deborah Blum

2011-10-28T08:41:00.002-04:00

Today's forgotten book is Ghost Hunters: William James And The Search For Scientific Proof Of Life After Death by Deborah Blum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The James family is central to the evolution of the modern ghost story, and this is an eye-opening account of that history which unfolds like a detective novel.

"I ain't afraid of no ghost."

The source of that quotation, repeated in the theme song from the movie Ghostbusters and its sequels, was the cartoon character, Goofy, and it originated in the Walt Disney movie that I discussed earlier this month, Lonesome Ghosts. Other borrowings from that cartoon are also apparent.

But the movie, Ghostbusters, has its source in a book by the grandfather of one of its stars, Dan Aykroyd, who wrote the foreword for the 2002 hardcover edition of A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters by Peter H. Aykroyd with Angela Narth. And that book had its source in the experiences of the family during the mass hysteria of spiritualism that swept much of western society during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The spiritualism movement is mainly a crime story, based mostly upon swindle and con artistry and showmanship, frauds preying upon the gullible and those in need of spiritual assurance of an afterlife. It gained in popularity after some leading Darwinists began denouncing religion.

The movement has faded away and spiritualism is now taken as a form of entertainment on a level with professional wrestling. There are still books published promoting spiritualism, but the books debunking them are never far behind, greater in force and respectability--Joe Nickell's The Real Life X-Files, for instance, which I read long before I picked up a copy of Deborah Blum's magnificent work.

After reading Blum's book, I realized how nearly every other book on the subject was too biased one way or the other. That the truth was somewhere in-between.

It is much like the more recent flurry of books on religion. On the one side, you had the fundamentalists, on the other side came such books as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Fortunately, the severity of bias in these books inspired a responding flurry of middle ground books decrying their excesses and putting the arguments for spirituality in an intelligent perspective--books such as David Berlinki's The Devils Delusion and Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe In Atheists.

Deborah Blum's work is non-fiction, but there is narrative tension aplenty. There certainly was for this reader who knew little of the history featured here.

Not only is Deborah Blum's work my choice for Forgotten Book of the Week, it is the only ghost book with a permanent spot on my most-beloved shelves. A keeper.

I can think of no better Halloween read.

Nightmare of the Night: Fuseli, Craig Ferguson, and Secretariat

2011-10-27T21:15:00.001-04:00

Should We Kick The Ghosts Out Of Crime Fiction?

2011-10-26T08:40:00.007-04:00

Fat chance of that happening. But there are many among us who want their cake without ice cream, their scotch without soda, and their mysteries without haints.

Many avid readers of Ed McBain expressed dismay whenever the author wandered into the twilight zone, as in his novel Ghosts--which was meant as a sort of a Christmas gift to his readers. I recall one reader who swore off McBain after reading it, who demanded some kind of warning label on any novels touched by the ecoplastic fingers of the surreal, like a red S on the spine of the book.

Over at author Declan Burke's excellent blog the other day, he wrote upon this regarding the novels of John Connolly:

"...John Connolly has refined the supernatural aspect of his earlier Charlie Parker novels, so that he’s now using the gothic tropes to go after a far more profound effect. There’s a scene in THE BURNING SOUL in which Charlie Parker comes downstairs in the middle of the night to find his TV on, cartoons playing, this in the midst of pursuing a case in which a young girl has been abducted. It’s a chilling piece of writing, certainly, but what it suggested to me was that Connolly wasn’t simply invoking ghosts and suchlike, but going after a far more subtle quality, attempting - successfully, in my opinion - to verbalise a sense of otherworldliness that is neither supernatural nor religious, although you could argue that it has a spiritual dimension."

"Maybe that’s just me, and maybe I should lay off the Kool-Aid while reading John Connolly, but I honestly think that viewing such aspects of his work, particularly over the last three or four novels, simply as ‘supernatural’ is to miss out on a far more delicate process of investigation that lies somewhere between a rationalising philosophy and an instinctive grasping after the ineffable."

No apology is necessary for Dr. Connolly's series protagonist, haunted by the past and especially by the deaths of his wife and daughter. Our best fiction has always gone after the transcendent. If the author doesn't overtly supply the transcendent, the reader has to read between the lines and supply it himself through a personal interpretation. Otherwise, at least to this reader, the book seems flat, just ink upon paper, a broken mirror with no reflection.

Charlie Parker ruminates; he has a gift for soliloquy. Readers with a similar experience or an evolved empathy will always understand. This isn't real; it is fiction, a cerebral performance; the lessons taught here are always in metaphor. Actors upon the stage. Three witches enter, stage left.

A bit earlier this month, I blogged about Stephen King's Danse Macabre, quoting him on the Halloween "Tarot cards," the archetypes of the vampire, the wolf man, and others. He says he excluded the Ghost, the most powerful Halloween Tarot card, from his discussion because the archetype of the ghost trumps everything and "spreads across too broad of an area."

King says, "The archetype of the Ghost is, after all, the Mississippi of all supernatural fiction," and it must be discussed at length because no particular novel can carry all of its varied implications. Ghosts are a part of us, often natural things upon which we project supernatural roles.

Indeed, we can be haunted by the past, which no longer exists; we can also be haunted by our suppressed guilt, for our acts or failures to act; we can be haunted by our suppressed animal nature, haunted by suppressed desire, haunted by missing loved ones, and haunted by the denied certainty of our pending deaths. In our literature, all of these things can easily manifest themselves as ghosts.

Ghosts are a part of us, even if we're staunch materialists who deny any spiritual attribute. As Stephen King points out, we may not consciously believe in ghosts but they are a central part of the myth pool, that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and people who do not go to films, have communally bathed."

We're ghosts ourselves. We appear and vanish. Take a look at your own self. Who are you? Let's peel the onion. Let's take away those things which were temporarily given to you by happenstance and will, sooner or later, be taken away forever. Beneath every layer, there's another layer, until we get down to the flesh and bones, our rags of light.

That's still you in there. But now let's disconnect that part of the brain which holds the memories of the past. You recover to walk and talk, as many stroke victims do, but you can't recognize anyone or remember the past. You don't know your spouse, nor can you remember that you have children. Is your self still yourself? Does the you that's you still exist?

And should you have another stroke and become functionally brain dead, where have you gone? Is that still you in the body you have lived in for so many years? Then the material body perishes completely, and what is left?

As Stephen Dobyns' had it in The Wrestler's Cruel Study, we may peel the last layer of the onion back and find "only wind and a dark place." Ghosts ourselves. No real thing.  Spiritual entities, alien to this material vale, having a temporary illusionary physical experience.

Perhaps.  I believe it myself. But to materialists in this vale, ghosts we are, no matter how you slice it, and the mystery remains.

Ghosts stand for the mystery.  Ghosts are what's left when everything's gone, without observers to calculate the zero representing nothing. Ghosts are the beginning before the beginning, the unknown something from out of the void. The question is: Why does existence bother to exist? Or if you prefer, why would a Holy Ghost bother with the animation of clay? Perhaps ghosts are lonely like God--or like Walt Disney's lonesome ghosts.

Ghosts can be even more than that, of course. The ghost is the joker in the deck, a wild card in the life of the imagination that can shapeshift to play a role in any hand, regardless of the other cards dealt. Angels, devils, messengers, guardians, doppelgangers, revenants, lost wanderers, benign observers, comic relief, lovers, crazies, harbingers, etc.

Ghosts multitask; they are the uninvited voices of our subconscious, the dim articulations of our dreams, the black magic at the end of realism, the hound of heaven we think we hear up ahead howling in the future--lost in the cloud of unknowing. Perhaps a ghost takes a hand in quantum theory, or perhaps as an accomplice in Godel's system without the system that can logically explain the system.

Ghosts can even appear in mystery novels.

Walt Disney's LONESOME GHOSTS: A Literary Interpretation

2011-10-24T11:26:00.001-04:00

Walt Disney's Lonesome Ghosts first appeared on Christmas Eve in 1937. It featured a trio of ghostbusters, the relatively cerebral Mickey Mouse, the emotional Donald Duck, and Goofy, the most id-dominated of this particular trinity.

It is not exactly mind, spirit, and body in the form of most trinities discussed in this blog, but remember that this is not only fiction, it is a cartoon. Let's be thankful for what we have.

The three are asleep, but their advertisements, the signs on the wall, tell us that they are ghostbusters, with hourly, weekly, or monthly rates. Business is not just slow, it is non-existent. I should point out that I like my non-existence with a hyphen to distinguish it from nonexistence, implying nothing with the zero removed. We are only dealing with a hyphenated subjective void at the moment.

Anyway, the three dream while the lonesome ghosts seek them out--just because they are lonesome, naturally. Lonesome nothings which don't really exist. The ghosts call them complaining of ghosts in their house, which of course is logical. All three ghostbusters are astonished by the sudden perception of real customers, though really the only customers are ghosts and hence unreal.

They arrive at the haunted house with an assortment of material means to battle spiritual entities: A shotgun, an axe, a club, and a butterfly net. All of which humorously backfire in due course and are used on themselves in several delightful we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us scenes.

The ghosts constantly mimic the ghostbusters. In this beautiful scene with Goofy and the dresser mirror, Goofy tries to outsmart himself, his mirror image. This is something like the pantomime Groucho and Harpo Marx had done four years earlier in the movie, Duck Soup.

The harder the ghostbusters try to hurt the ghosts, the more they hurt themselves. This reverberates in the sudden climax of the film, as the ghosts laugh at the foibles of the ghostbusters until they begin to take themselves seriously, causing them to fear ghosts too. They then run away (from themselves).

The lesson here is the same as in Peter Straub's classic Ghost Story, which I reviewed earlier this month. The ghosts are us, that part of us we sublimate and deny. The truth is, WE ARE THE LONESOME GHOSTS!

Medium vs. the Mentalist?

2011-10-23T04:56:00.000-04:00

Medium versus The Mentalist?

After several years, Medium was cancelled, despite good ratings. The Mentalist is not a good substitute.

The Mentalist couldn't do without ghosts either. Ghosts are his foils, red herrings to eliminate, tricks of dark light to illuminate and dispel. Folks wait through the barrage of commercials for him to finally put the got in his gotcha, a logical ending, no inconclusive waiting for Godot.

As for Medium, writers come and go, some episodes were very good and some were terrible, but for at least a couple of its years on the air, it was one of the best-written and most literary crime shows to be found. The Halloween shows were always good, and I wish they would rerun them. I remember the one featuring Elvira.

To solve crimes in life, give me a logical detective. For fictional media entertainment, give me Medium. The Mentalist is sometimes smart, but Medium was more often wise.

Medium also had a more ironic sense of humor, and The Mentalist never approaches the transcendant of humanism, even in the best episodes that I've seen of it (and we do not bother seeing every episode now). This lack is glaring at times, making its protagonist seem very shallow indeed, empty, an ego in a void, without any love other than an obsessive love of the past and an illogical need for revenge.

The mentalist/protagonist lives in denial of his ghosts. He is haunted by the past. Where is the past? It doesn't exist. It's gone. Yet the mentalist is obsessed with it and, worse, in denial of his obsession. These days, show after show now, the writers have him projecting revenge while simply exposing the con artists who pretend to be psychics, usually in a banal plot linked with kidnapping and murder.

Badly written fluff. The cliched repetition is getting old, fellas. It is high time the mentalist got smart, got real, and took stock of himself.

The Best Literary Halloween Horse: Washington Irving's GUNPOWDER

2011-10-22T04:20:00.001-04:00

Hey, my wife and I owned horses for years and we still consider ourselves to be horse people; and I used to follow that remark with the news that I would once again be the rear end of the costume next Halloween.

Some things never change.

My favorite horse when I was six years old is still my favorite Halloween horse. Walt Disney's show opened slowly. He would go to his library and return with some big old volume and open it. Then the television program would finally begin in earnest, right after the crummy commercial, when he showed us the title: Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

To me, this was what Halloween was all about, candy aside: Ichabod and his horse being funny, scared out of their wits one minute and laughing themselves silly the next. Only to be scared once again and in hysterical flight from the headless horseman through the dark woods.

Later I read the story. Disney had improved upon almost everything, but that horse, Gunpowder, still had significant and endearingly comic potential. Washington Irving wrote:

"The animal he bestrode was a broken-down plow horse that had outlived almost everything but his viciousness. He was gaunt and shagged, with an ewe neck and a head like a hammer. His rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost a pupil and was glaring and spectral; but the other eye had the gleam of a genuine devil in it."

"Still he must have had fire and mettle in his day, if we may judge from his name, which was Gunpowder."

There are two versions of the Walt Disney classic, the full version and a hokey abbreviated version with some of the best Gunpowder plot scenes removed and the snipped version repackaged with some more toady fare with dubious Halloween connections. Also the narration differs greatly. Be sure to get the original full version.

Likewise, there are different versions of the music. I certainly enjoy Bing Crosby's voice but the jazziest, scariest, funniest, most adult, most delightful rendition of the Headless Horseman theme song was released back in the day by Jean Stafford. We listen to it every year on our Halloween soundtrack:

"You can't reason with a headless man."

Friday's Forgotten Book: Charles Beaumont's NIGHT RIDE and Other Journeys and Jazz

2011-10-21T19:42:00.004-04:00

The title story in this collection--first published in March, 1960--is neither very sinister nor very fantastic. Some of the others in here fill that bill nicely and were adapted into episodes of The Twilight Zone. Nay, the story "Night Run" is better described as gritty noir, and in my opinion, it is the best piece of fiction that Charles Beaumont ever published during his entire career.

Here's the opening, narrated by the trumpet player in a jazz band:

He was a scrawny white kid with junkie eyes and no place for his hands, but he had the look. The way he ankled past the tables, all along by himself; the way he yanked the stool, then, and sat there doing nothing; you could tell. He wasn't going to the music. The music had to come to him. And he could wait. . .

The kid's hands crawled up and settled on the keys. They started to walk, slow and easy, taking their time. No intro. No chords. Just, all of a sudden, music.

The music is the blues. The kid plays with the band, and the band plays jazz, but the kid turns everything into the blues, deeply felt and infinitely sorrowful. He doesn't hit all the notes, just the right ones.

The kid swung into some chestnuts, "St. James Infirmary" and "Bill Bailey." But what he did to them was vicious. St. James came out a place full of spiders and snakes and screaming broads, and Bailey was a dirty bastard who left his woman when he need her most. He played "Stardust" like a boy scout helping a cripple across the street. And you want to know something about "Sweet Georgia Brown"? Just another seedy hustler too tired to turn a trick.

Beaumont's narrator goes on to describe the kid's methods, an impromptu college course on the blues, replete with the bebop slang of the 1950s. The band's signature tune is "Night Ride," but the only horse the kid has anything to do with is heroin. Like many of the blues artists of his time, his personal life is a nightmare, caught in the vortex of addiction, spiraling downward. His only outlet is the piano.

The first plot twist is that, after the kid falls in love again, his new lover helps him to regain balance in his life. But then his deeply felt blues talent starts to dry up as well. With a normal life, he can still be a journeyman musician, just not one of the greats. There are plot twists after that, but I'll not spoil it for you.

I also recommend Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. As if picking up exactly where "Night Ride" left off, Dyer's jazzy descriptions of jazz zing with colorful metaphors and snazzy similes. He creates amazing riffs on the lives and music of jazz greats, including Art Pepper, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Ben Webster, Lester Young, and Duke Ellington.

I read Dyer's book back when it first came out. I touted it to everyone, amazed that it didn't immediately become a bestseller. I can recall first reading Raymond Chandler as a kid, being charmed by his figures of speech. That memory arose soon after beginning this book, as Mingus's "bass marched everyone along like a bayonet in a prisoner’s back.” Monk “played each note as though astonished by the previous one,” often leaving the feeling that “the song seemed to have turned inside out.”

These are not rare examples; Dyer does this stuff page after page. Although the prose is rich, the cream on top is balanced by a sense of timing, insights that make you shake your head in wonder, and that beauty offset by the deep tragedy of its players, strung out on drugs, riding the nightmare too.

But what a beautiful book!