The rain moved into hail, peppering the windshield and body of the truck, reminding me of stones thrown against metal fences, of pellet guns fired into graineries [sic].
Time travel is always an intriguing topic in fiction, and since we haven’t figured out how to actually do it yet, we have infinite options as to how to imagine it. H. G. Wells created his time machine. I built tunnels between worlds in a couple of my novels. Craig Terlson, in his novel, Bent Highway, imagines it as something like a road trip with Hunter S. Thompson, as filmed by some French New Wave director.
We first meet our hero, whose name is only given as “M.”, as he’s sitting in a diner, heating up a teaspoon preparatory cauterizing an arm wound with it – a wound he can’t remember receiving. We gradually learn that he’s engaged in a cross-country road trip, but from time to time he loses consciousness – seeming to slip through cracks in the earth – and awakens somewhere else – in someone else’s car, or in a bar, or in a brightly lit room. Sometimes he’s with a mysterious tall man, and sometimes he’s with a beautiful, white-skinned woman. Sometimes people attack him with cars or guns or knives. Gradually we – and he – realize that he’s been at this for some time, but keeps forgetting the incidents, which he doesn’t experience in strict chronological order. He learns that he has a dangerous enemy, and that he needs to be in just the right place at the right time in order to erase and overwrite some event from his past, to save the world.
The classic time travel conundrum of “What will happen if I meet myself in the past?” is handled offhandedly here – M. not only meets his past self, but an infinite number of his past selves, captured at each moment in his life.
Craig Terlson’s characteristic vivid writing style is showcased once again in Bent Highway. “The morning sun drilled a perfect hole in the cerulean sky,” is a good example. Unfortunately, the effect is marred from time to time by numerous typographical errors.
Sadly, the book is a cliff-hanger, and I don’t believe the sequel has appeared yet. I hope it does.
Sometime in the late 1960s, Walker West is a young man at loose ends in New York City. He wants to be a writer, but has had no success. Witnessing an explosion, he helps to rescue a couple victims from beneath the rubble. One of them is a young woman, with whom he immediately falls in love. A moment later, the police come along to arrest that young woman for the murder of her fiancé. Walker impulsively promises her that he’ll prove her innocence.
So begins A Fire In Every Vein, by Lawrence J. Epstein. It’s the first book in a series of mysteries. As a novice investigator, Walker has one advantage the average guy doesn’t enjoy – his Aunt Agatha (a tribute to P. G. Wodehouse?), who is very rich and very influential. Being concerned over her nephew’s lack of motivation to date, she happily encourages his sudden enthusiasm by providing him with an office, an attractive female assistant, and a bodyguard. She also pulls strings to get him hired as a crime reporter by a New York paper, and as an investigator by the insurance company concerned, so he has two excuses to poke his nose into the case.
If that seems like a lot of what’s known nowadays as “privilege,” I thought the same thing. Money can be a great advantage for a fictional investigator (see Lord Peter Wimsey [who gets an endorsement in this book] and Nick Charles), but a protagonist in a story needs to struggle too. It often felt as if Walker was getting along too easily – though he suffers plenty of setbacks, most often because of his own rookie mistakes.
And that’s another problem with the story. A learning curve works just fine as a template for rising dramatic tension, but Walker seems to be almost laughably feckless.
I stayed with A Fire in Every Vein to the end because the author is a decent writer in the grammatical sense. He can string a sentence together, which puts him ahead of most novelists nowadays. And I couldn’t help identifying personally with Walker’s cluelessness.
But overall, the book didn’t work. The characters weren’t distinctive, and the dialogue was unnatural. Graceful and grammatical, yes, but not natural.
What finally disappointed me, though, was the ending, which (in my view) was so inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the book that it felt like a cheat.
I believe author Epstein has written further novels, and I’m glad of it. I think he has the makings of a good novelist. But A Fire in Every Vein just didn’t work for me.
This is the week I turned back to the keyboard. Narration practice is on pause, because my readers’ critiques are in. Most of them relate to typos, but some have to do with plot elements. I’m working now, thanks to a good suggestion, on weaving a small plot thread into one section, which ought to improve… the tone, I guess. It’ll make an underused character stronger, and give them a way to help advance the story. (I can’t afford to pay my characters to just loaf around, chapter after chapter!)
I’m still getting up at 6:30 am to get my writing time in, though my body has instituted base countermeasures. In order to prevent me getting more than six (sometimes four) hours of sleep at night, it’s moved my natural wake-up time back to 5:00 a.m. I suppose I could get up and write then, but I have no doubt my body would then start waking me at 4:00, and it would just be a war of retreat by inches, until I became fully nocturnal.
I saw a clip of Jordan Peterson, who has, I understand, adopted a carnivore diet. He said he’s gotten good results against depression by telling his patients to eat a high-protein breakfast shortly after waking up in the morning. I’ve been putting breakfast off till I got back from the gym (gym comes after writing, that’s the schedule) at about 9:00. So I’ll try Peterson’s way now. This morning I had my breakfast sausage first thing instead of later. We’ll see how that goes.
Otherwise, I have a deadline coming up the first of May for the small magazine I’m editing, and I suspect it’s be a nail-biter getting it all done on time.
Right now, my hopes and dreams are focused on getting into May. I figure things will ease up in May.
Come to think of it, that’s what I said about April.
A lot of the motivation behind cheating must come from the charge you get. To truly understand the psychology of a cheater, you need to see the world like a con artist. In this worldview, everything is rigged—the casino, politics, Wall Street, life—and there are only two types of people: grifters and suckers. (It’s a lot like in magic, where you’re either a magician or a layperson.) If you look around the table and don’t see a sucker, then, according to an old saying, the sucker is you.
I remember a time in my childhood when I wanted very much to learn magic. I never had the resources, and today I’m pretty sure my natural clumsiness would have doomed it anyway. But those memories came back as I considered a bargain deal for Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. So I bought it. With some exceptions, I found the book enjoyable and educational, though I don’t think the author is someone I’d care to have lunch with.
He knows how to tell a story, though. He piques our interest by opening with an excruciating personal anecdote – how, as a green magician, he participated in the 2006 World Championships of Magic in Stockholm, and made an utter fool of himself in front of the some of the best practitioners in the world.
Then he tells the story of his journey with magic. He got interested as a kid, and his fascination grew, to the point where he neglected his graduate studies in Physics to attend classes and seminars, and spent more than he could afford on books and paraphernalia. He studies psychology and clowning to gain greater understanding of audience dynamics. He meets a colorful variety of master magicians – most interesting to me was Richard Turner, the world’s foremost “card mechanic,” who happens to be totally blind. He manipulates playing cards purely by touch. (Also, interestingly, we’re told he goes to church.)
The author does not come off as a terribly winning personality, but that may be due in part to his self-deprecating jokes. He writes a lot about the scientific/psychological underpinnings of the practice of illusion, and sometimes draws conclusions which annoyed me. For instance, he states, as if it were self-evident, that Jesus Christ was obviously a magician. In the spirit of all con men, he seems to view everything he sees as a game of one sort or another. Wall Street, he tells us, is just a casino with very high stakes.
His musings on Physics seem (to me) to draw exactly the wrong conclusions – the laws of science don’t rule out the existence of a Creator, as he seems to assume. For some of us, they affirm it. If entropy is the universal fact, where do those orderly laws come from in the first place?
On the other hand, I must admit his prose is excellent. Great lines abound, like: “A shrill carbon stink clung to the air like a bad habit.”
And he rounds his story out with a highly satisfying chapter telling how, more seasoned now, he redeemed his reputation as a magician with an original card trick that mystified the pros.
This is a very good book, with which I sometimes disagreed. Still, the quality can’t be denied, and I recommend it with a few reservations.
“I find his movies deeply sad,” Jeremy said as we were driving.
“I don’t think he’d be happy to hear that,” I said. “He thinks they’re comedies.”
“Comedy does not mean we must laugh,” said Jeremy. “It is the reverse of tragedy. It suggests that life can continue without hope.”
The late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels are amusing reads, and they take a high road. I mean by that that a novelist, when producing stories about old Hollywood stars, would naturally be inclined to give the public what they want – sleaze and scandal. But Kaminsky (who was, I think, a very decent man), chose to handle them lightly, in comic stories. We get to see the stars at their best and most sympathetic.
The challenge of that approach seems to have been considerable in A Fatal Glass of Beer, in which Toby’s client is W. C. Fields. It’s hard to make Fields a likeable character, but Kaminsky does manage to make him a sympathetic one.
It’s 1943. Toby Peters, who for comic purposes persists as a low-rent PI, in spite of all the celebrity clients he’s served over the years, is facing some changes in his life. His ex-wife, for whom he’s carried a torch for years, is getting married to a movie star. He consoles himself, however, with a new girlfriend. He’s considering moving out of his broom closet office in a dentist’s office, due to a conflict with the dentist’s wife. And he’s reached a truce with his estranged brother, the cop, now that his sister-in-law has cancer.
W. C. Fields shows up with a problem that could have happened only to him. Over the years, during his vaudeville days, he put his financial eggs in many baskets by opening savings accounts, under assumed names, in various banks across the US. Now someone has stolen a number of his bank books, and is going around to the banks and withdrawing the funds. Fields wants Toby to accompany him on a road trip, to hunt the scoundrel down and recover the bank books and stolen money. Toby can use the business, though Fields is a challenging travel companion. Toby enlists his midget friend Gunther to serve as driver, and they set out on their transcontinental odyssey in Field’s Cadillac, fully equipped with a built-in bar and a stock of liquor in the trunk.
The hunt is a slapstick affair, until people start getting killed. Secrets are revealed, leading to further secrets. And W. C. Fields comes through it all unfazed, insensitive to others’ needs, dependent on alcohol, securely anchored in the persona he has created for himself, though we perceive more and more that in his heart he’s deeply lonely and sad. That Kaminsky succeeds in making us care about him is a testimony to his characterization skill.
I’d describe A Fatal Glass of Beer as one of the best entries in this classic series.
Today’s hymn, “Let Thy Blood in Mercy Poured,” comes from the Greek tradition, and maybe if I could type Greek, I could search for the title on Greek pages. But the sources I’ve seen give no date for that version of the hymn, only that is came into English via Glasgow native and Free Church minister John Brownlie (1857-1925). The tune is much older, written by Lutheran cantor at Berlin’s St. Nicholas Church, Johann Crüger (1598-1662).
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1 ESV).
1 Let thy blood in mercy poured, let thy gracious body broken, be to me, O gracious Lord, of thy boundless love the token.
Refrain: Thou didst give thyself for me, now I give myself to thee.
2 Thou didst die that I might live; blessed Lord, thou cam’st to save me; all that love of God could give Jesus by his sorrows gave me. [Refrain]
3 By the thorns that crowned thy brow, by the spear wound and the nailing, by the pain and death, I now claim, O Christ, thy love unfailing. [Refrain]
4 Wilt thou own the gift I bring? All my penitence I give thee; thou art my exalted King, of thy matchless love forgive me. [Refrain]
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
Matthew Arnold, “Growing Old”
Matthew Arnold captures something in his 1867 poem “Growing Old.” I don’t know what is exactly. Seems a bit obtuse to a spry Gen-Xer like me. But I was thinking of old things today, because I’ve caught wind of many recent archeological finds and thought I’d share them with you today.
Vikings: Let’s start with the unearthing of over a couple thousand fragments of combs and brooches, some “carved from the antlers of red deer, and a few were made of bones from animals like whales.”
Ice Skating: Archeologists with the Comenius Museum in Přerov, the Czech Republic’s Moravia region, discovered a 1,000-year-old ice skate. “It dates back to the time when there was a very important fortress in the area of the Upper Square. It served as a stronghold for Polish King Boleslav the Brave, who occupied Moravia at the time and had his soldiers stationed there.”
Greeks and Romans: Pompeii got even more impressive with the discovery of gorgeous frescos depicting Helen of Troy and Cassandra
🚨NEW 🚨
I was on site at Pompeii shortly after they made the stunning discovery of exquisite frescoes of figures from the Trojan War in a newly uncovered winter dining room.
And researchers working in the area of Rome’s Colosseum have uncovered a home with an exceptional mural showing “weapons and musical instruments as well as ships and tridents.” The director general of museums at the Italian culture ministry said, “There is nothing else like it from this period in Rome. There is nothing like it even at Pompeii.”
Swedish Longsword: And finally, the grave of a tall Swedish man with an impressive longsword was violated by the Halland Cultural Environment in their unrestrained excavations of the Franciscan friary in Halmstad. I fear for the townspeople who will be troubled by his vengeful ghost.
This happens to be the exact microphone I am using, a Blue Yeti, a gift from a friend. Photo credit Chris Yang, chrisyangchrisfilm. Unsplash license.
Landmark achieved. Another step climbed. Pardon me for talking myself up tonight, but I actually accomplished something that had daunted me, and I need to try to overcome my reflexive tendency to downplay it.
So this is the situation – I have “mastered” the Audacity recording application. Audacity is a free app that’s probably the most common one used by at-home voiceover artists and narrators. I’ve been wrestling with it for some time now. Has it been months? I’d have to look it up, which seems like a lot of trouble.
In any case, you need to understand my history with recording engineering. (I mentioned this the last time I gave you an update.) I went to radio broadcast school and hold a (entirely undeserved, and I null and void now, I think) Radiotelegraph Engineer’s license. But I always struggled with the technical stuff. Working with Audacity, is of course, very different from what I fumbled around with in radio back in the 1980s, but I find it equally challenging. Audacity (not really a complicated app) combines the challenges of radio with the challenges of digital technology. For a child of the analogue age, a “digital immigrant” as they call us, it was less than comfortable.
But – and this is what gives me a small amount of satisfaction – I went to work at it systematically. During my morning writing session each day (except that I skip Sundays) I would set up my recording space (like many home voice artists, I employ my closet) and worked at learning Audacity. I watched a lot of how-to videos on YouTube. I studied the instruction book I bought. And I practiced. Cautiously, and with trepidation.
I decided that, due to the considerable stress unfamiliar technology causes me (I actually woke up from a dream one night, my heart pounding), I needed to take it in small steps. I tackled one challenge at a time, researching and practicing one single operation, one skill, at a time. Once I’d gotten the new thing down, I stopped. The Voices in my Head called me lazy. Said I should do something more now, not waste time. But I had decided that sufficient unto the day was the stress of that one step.
I repeated this program day after day. Some days I got nothing done. I hadn’t yet solved the problem. But I figured I’d accumulated sufficient stress for the present.
And gradually, I figured stuff out. The last step stumped me for a couple days – the operation of cutting and pasting, to make corrections on a track already recorded. My instruction book was unclear, and so were several videos I viewed.
This morning I sat down and just played with the app. Viewed a new video, which helped a little. Finally, I tried something that worked. I had it. I’m not a master of Audacity by any means, but I understand the basic operations, I think, that I need.
Of course, now I’m going to drop it completely for a while. It’s time to get back to The Baldur Game, my work in progress. That’s part of the overall plan. Now that I’ve heard back from my beta readers, I need to evaluate their suggestions and get the book into final shape.
Then there’ll be the process of publishing the thing through Amazon, another technical challenge I’m uncomfortable with, but I imagine I can figure it out.
I do not lack things to occupy me, for the immediate future.
Something else happened today too. I was messing with another piece of new software, a publishing program I have to use for a side gig. And I figured something out on that too.
And I had another (fleeting) moment of satisfaction.
I then had an odd, unusual (for me) thought. I thought, “It’s kind of nice that I’m poor in my old age. If I were rich right now, I’d be vegetating, sitting on a lounge chair somewhere where it’s warm, letting my body run down. I know myself. I never move too far out of my comfort zone unless I’m forced to.”
Instead, in my 70s, I’m learning new stuff, expanding my skills. Keeping young (in a sense), in spite of myself.
God, the Author, seems to be at work plotting again. And plotting, as I’ve often said, means torturing your characters.
I’m not sure how I came to do it again. I bought a mystery written by E. X. Ferrars, an author who uses initials instead of a first name, which is usually a sign of a female writer. I tend to find mysteries by women a little alien, but somehow I ended up with this one. I assume I must have gotten it for free. And, as with the similarly named author M. K. Farrar a few days back, I found the book surprisingly enjoyable. For the most part.
E. X. Ferrars was a British author, born Morna Doris MacTaggert. She had a long and successful career. Among her series characters were Virginia and Felix Freer, the protagonists of Death of a Minor Character, published in 1983.
Virginia Freer is a physical therapist living and working in a town some distance from London. A young friend is planning to return home to Australia, and asks her to a farewell party at her flat – in the same London building that’s home to her ex-husband (separated) Felix, with whom she’s still friendly. A fairly mismatched group, including Felix, show up for the party, including a jewelry artist and an old lady who lives in the building.
Not long after, a shopkeeper in Virginia’s town, a casual friend of hers, is murdered, as well the old lady from the party. What ties them together seems to be the dragon-motif silver jewelry the artist designs. Felix is moved to investigate – not so much for the sake of the shopkeeper as for the old lady, whom he compares to one of those minor characters who get killed in books and movies without anybody giving a second thought to them.
E. X. Ferrars was a lively and original writer. What makes this book work is the characters of Virginia and Felix – especially Felix, who is a constant surprise. He is, we are told, a liar and a petty thief, always on the edge of legality. He doesn’t seem to really grasp ordinary moral concepts. But underneath he has a deep sense of justice.
I enjoyed the book, but I have to say I never really believed in Felix. I suspect the author (who was an atheist and a leftist) wanted to open people’s minds to the idea that there were more ways of being a good person than the stuffy old mores we grew up with.
I reject that. Liars and thieves are not “morally creative” (as I put it in my novel, Wolf Time), but people who lack a moral core. The way you do little things is the way you do big things. Dishonesty is, at bottom, just another kind of cowardice.
But I can’t deny that Death of a Minor Character was an entertaining and well-written novel. The conclusion, though, was a little anticlimactic.
What Arthur saw was nothing like what Moren saw. He saw no silver trees, nor the shining suns of souls, nor the blue glow of possibility, of hope, or of longing. Arthur saw before him the legends, rising up in shapes like griffins and dragons, growing about him in the way that lilies grow up like miracles in a forest where once stood some forgotten cottage. They stole his breath, and for a time it was so quiet in his tent that even the roar of celebration outside seemed to vanish away.
B. A. Patty blogs at Grim’s Hall, one of the blogs I’ve been following for years. He’s a reader of my novels too. But he’s even less aggressive about marketing his novel, Arms and White Samite, than I am in regard to mine. In fact, I’d forgotten he had one until he offered a deal recently, and I picked it up. It’s an impressive book, one that deserves greater recognition than it’s received.
Our hero is Moren, a warrior of Arthur’s Company of the Wall (the book is set in “King” Arthur’s original historical context, with certain supernatural intrusions). One day a lady dressed in white rides into Arthur’s hall, pursued by a great, fearsome knight armored in black. In spite of Arthur’s men’s attempts to protect her, the knight carries her off. Moren takes upon himself the quest of rescuing the lady. He follows her through a forest, where he rescues another lady who becomes his companion, and later into a fortress, where he is taken prisoner. A group of his brothers follow to help – or rescue – him. Meanwhile, the Saxons are harrying the land, and Arthur faces the challenges and sacrifices of total war against an enemy led by a king who is more than human.
For me, the greatest appeal of the Arthurian stories has always been, more than the tales of chivalry and valor, the hints of mystery behind it all – ancient names of places lost to history, shadowy characters who seem not quite human in some undefined way. Arms and White Samite is rich in those elements. It’s actually as much about the realms of faery as about this world (though the battle scenes are excellent, and seem historically plausible).
Quite a lot of time is spent in discussions about the intersection of this world and the Otherworld, and the nature of life and eternity. Questions of theodicy (the problem of evil) are central. Although the matrix of the philosophy seems Christian, there are elements that seem Buddhist and syncretist. This left me puzzled, but I’m not sure I understood it well enough to judge.
There were a couple typos (at least I think they were typos; perhaps I misunderstood the antique diction), and on very rare occasions the author made the questionable artistic choice of using exclamation points in exposition.
Still, all in all, I think Arms and White Samite is the kind of book C. S. Lewis would have liked very much.
