Midnight Pass, by Stuart M. Kaminsky

I believe this is the last “new” Lew Fonesca book I’ll be able to read, and that makes me sad. Midnight Pass isn’t the last book in the series (that was Always Say Goodbye, which I’ve already reviewed). But it was the last one I found. Stuart M. Kaminsky’s bald little hero, whose stories would never have appealed to me purely on the basis of their synopses, won me over completely. I miss all the books Kaminsky might have written if he’d lived, but I miss the Lew Fonesca stories most.

Lew Fonesca, if you’re not familiar with him, is a man hiding from life. After the death of his wife he moved from Chicago to Sarasota, where he lives in a room behind his tiny office. His existence consists of delivering summonses during the day and watching old movies on his VCR at night. At least that’s his plan. But life keeps intruding. People need help. He helps them. They tend to become friends. Lew’s saga (I only realized it after reading this book) is the story of the gradual re-integration of a traumatized personality. These books could have been downers, but in fact they’re full of hope.

In this story, Lew is hired by a minister, also a city council member, to find a fellow councilman who has disappeared and whose vote is needed to fight a development project. He also gets involved in the problems of a married couple, involving the wife running off with her husband’s business partner. There’s kidnapping, and shots are fired. Meanwhile, Lew keeps his appointments with his therapist, and contemplates becoming a Big Brother. In the end he solves the mysteries and averts some evil.

Reading a Lew Fonesca mystery is like spending time with the best friend you ever had. I’ll miss you, Lew.

Cautions for language and violence, but nothing over the top.

Self-prescribed Tunnel Vision

Goggle Make-up TestIf we continue to watch only the titillating shows and avoid the thoughtful ones, if we get out of the house only for novelty, then eventually all of entertainment will be sequels, writes A.G. Harmon in Image Journal. “If to exercise the body we must accept discomfort, pushing beyond pain,” he states, “to exercise the mind requires a related effort, an involvement that rejects the passive, formaldehyde bath of strobing visuals. A human is more than his eyes—certainly more than his ocular reflexes—and to be human means breaking free of this dangerous trap.”

We could easily dismiss this if Harmon was referring only to popular entertainment, meaning that which is nationally distributed in some way. But I’m sure he is urging us to embrace our local culture by attending concerts, plays, art shows, story-tellings, jamborees and town hall meetings (touching on the civic side of public involvement). By seeking only the exciting or shocking stuff, we risk narrowing our vision, withdrawing into our inner space, and closing off most of the world. Harmon warns us against an obsession with personal comfort.

Ulysses Among the Dead

Since this is Bloomsday for some, let me direct your attention to an old post on Scott Huler’s book, No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey. This is Huler’s memoir/travelogue on his adventure following the path of Odysseus in Homer’s epic. At one point, the hero reports, “I had no choice but to come down to Hades and consult the soul of Theban Teiresias.” Huler didn’t want to attempt a trip to the underworld, so he opted for the Capuchin cemetery within the Church of the Immaculate Conception (Chiesa di Santa Maria della Concezione). Read his description here.

Today Is–Do You Care?

June 16 is National Fudge Day in America. While quacks in Dublin are raising pints to each other for Bloomsday, we right-minded, freedom-loving Americans are baking fudge, pouring it on our ice cream, browsing the varieties at specialty shops, and chucking last year’s frost-burned fudge bars at errant congressmen.

But speaking of Bloomsday, Frank Delaney’s podcast actually makes Joyce’s Ulysses sound interesting. Maybe the key to enjoying Ulysses is listening to someone who’s read it talk about it.

Wild Bill's Last Trail, by Ned Buntline

According to an anecdote, E. Z. C. Judson, better known as Ned Buntline, traveled west to Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to meet the famous pistoleer, Wild Bill Hickok, about whom he wished to write dime novels. He found him in his natural environment (a saloon), and rushed up to him, crying, “There’s my man! I want you!” Hickok pulled a revolver on him and told him to be out of town in 24 hours.

Perhaps it’s the memory of Wild Bill’s nickel-plated Colt Navy .36 that accounts for the jaundiced view of the man we find in the deservedly forgotten little novel, Wild Bill’s Last Trail.



Ned Buntline

I downloaded it to read on my Kindle because I’m a Wild Bill buff, and although I’ve read much about Buntline over the years (whatever they tell you in the movies, he never gave Wyatt Earp a long-barreled revolver) but had never savored the quality of his actual prose.

Well, it’s quality prose, in the sense that pretentiousness is a quality, and floridity is a quality too.

“…there’s a shadow as cold as ice on my soul! I’ve never felt right since I pulled on that red-haired Texan at Abilene, in Kansas. You remember, for you was there. It was kill or get killed, you know, and when I let him have his ticket for a six-foot lot of ground he gave one shriek—it rings in my years yet. He spoke but one word— ‘Sister!’ Yet that word has never left my ears, sleeping or waking, from that time to this.”

I must admit that, although I expected the purple prose and the improbable action, one aspect of the book surprised me. I had expected “white hats” and “black hats,” one-dimensional good guys and bad guys. But in fact, this is a Wild West where the deer and the ambivalent play. Wild Bill is arguably the real villain, and everybody who wants to kill him (there are many) seems to have a good reason. One sympathetic character—shades of Dances With Wolves—is not only a professional killer, but has made common cause with the Sioux and plans to join Sitting Bull.

The only explanation I can think of for all this is that Ned must have really held a grudge for the Fort McPherson incident. He also finds numerous opportunities to condemn Wild Bill’s drinking (Ned Buntline made a sideline of lecturing on Temperance—utterly hypocritically, as he drank plenty himself),

I might add that the climax manages to be at once melodramatic, historically inaccurate, and confusing. If you can figure it out on the first reading, you’re a better reader than I am.

Not a good book, Wild Bill’s Last Trail is an interesting historical curiosity.

Literature vs. Trash

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash,” writes Evelyn Waugh, and he backs it up too. This link is particularly relevant to our blog because I posted a G.M.Hopkins poem to the moon earlier this week.

Friedman: Is the Book Dead? Who Cares!

Publishing is still innovating, says Jane Friedman, so even if one type of book becomes permanently out of print, other types will live on. Printed books won’t go out of print any time soon, but other types me dominate the future market. Remember the first cell phones? What if today’s Kindles and Nooks looked like that in 10-20 years compared to what they will become?

An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Col. W. F. Cody)

Another public domain book I downloaded to my Kindle is An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill. I’d call it a pretty good acquisition for anyone interested in the Wild West. It’s not too long, and it reads pretty well for a Victorian memoir.

I personally have always viewed Buffalo Bill as a sort of supporting character to his more dangerous friend, Wild Bill Hickok. This is unfair, as Cody’s lasting achievement, both in terms of his influence on the opening of the West, and on American culture in general, far outstrips Hickok’s. One wouldn’t be far off in calling Cody America’s first great media celebrity. (Why he states in this book, without explanation, that Wild Bill ended up an “outlaw” is a mystery. But I understand they parted on bad terms.)

There’s some dispute as to how much one may trust Cody’s own account of his life. Some historians dispute, for instance, whether he ever rode for the Pony Express as he claims here (the documentary evidence is incomplete). But even adjusting for a showman’s self-promotion, it’s quite a life story. Left fatherless at an early age (his father was murdered by pro-slavery ruffians in Kansas), he provided for his mother and siblings by hunting and taking odd jobs as a wagon driver. Eventually his specialized skills and knowledge of the country made him a famous scout and buffalo hunter. This introduced him to influential men and to the press, opening doors to his ultimate career as a showman.

It’s an exciting tale, full of adventures, chases, escapes, and battles. Much is left unsaid (such as his drinking problem and his marital problems), but nobody wrote tell-alls in those days.

He ends the book with a tribute to the American Indians, expressing his respect for them as friends and enemies. He recognizes their legitimate complaints, but sees it as self-evident that the white man could make better use of the land, and so was right to take it.

Young readers should be cautioned about racial depictions common at the time, but unacceptable today. Still, they ought to read it simply as a multicultural exercise.

Moonrise

MoonriseI awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:

The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,

Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,

Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;

A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly.

This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,

Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

“Moonrise” by Gerard Manley Hopkins