“In the wonderful world of Walker Percy, old fashioned Southern gentility saunters in seersucker into sub human behavior and sips bourbon while planning a congenial genocide.
Their shabby chic sophistication makes the nefarious activities of the characters in The Thanatos Syndrome even more chilling.”
Truth triumphs over sentimentality in this story. Dwight Longenecker explores it for us.
I’ve heard people use the term “price point,” and I’m pretty sure they only meant “price,” but thought “price point” sounded professional or something.
I’m sure there’s a proper way to use “price point,” but I’m not sure what it is.
In any case, the price point for my self-published novels has been adjusted to $2.99. This does not affect the price points for my Baen or Nordskog novels.
Try Death’s Doors, here.
Now this is a vocabulary test.
An independent American-Brazilian research project is “measuring vocabulary sizes according to age and education, and particularly to compare native learning rates with foreign language classroom learning rates.” They ask you to check all the words you can define, not just ones you think you’ve seen before. I got a respectable score, but yours will probably be better. Feel free to let us know. If you know what vibrissae and uxoricide are without me telling you, you’ll do great on this test.
“Kjell Askildsen writes what might reasonably be called ghost stories in which there are no ghosts.” (via Prufrock)
When you’re next in Prague, you can settle into the “green velvet chairs under brass chandeliers” in the Grand Cafe Orient, “designed by Czech cubist Joseph Gocar in 1912 (and restored to its original splendour in 2005), order Czech pastries, like medovnik (layered cream and honey cake) and traditional apple strudel with your coffee, which will be brought to you by uniformed waiters.” This is where you’ll buy a Preso s mlékem, “long espresso with cold or steamed milk (usually served on the side)” or Vídenská káva, “long espresso in a tall glass with lots of whipped cream on top.”
Or you could visit a new cafe, La Bohème. “The interior is a mishmash of arty decor with patches of wallpaper depicting frothy clouds and shelves of books, with violins hanging from the ceiling. Beans are roasted upstairs and your order comes either on a silver tray or a leather coaster. Display cupboards hold collections of house coffees, moka and vacuum pots and Hario Skerton hand grinders for sale (about £27).”
River Springs Charter Schools in California is reportedly removing all Christian books from its library shelves.
The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), a legal defense organization, has been circulating the accusation that this network of California charter schools is culling its stock of Christian material, notably The Hiding Place
The school says it receives state funds and so cannot allow “sectarian materials on our state-authorized lending shelves.” On their Facebook page, the school states, “No, we are not banning Christian novels at all. We are not allowed to provide sectarian textbooks however, so this is where the confusion comes in. So it’s yes to novels, no to textbooks as a public school.”
But attorneys with PJI say the Supreme Court has a “long-established precedent that strongly disapproves of school libraries removing books based on opposition to their content or message.”
Now I fully understand that “sectarian” could be defined in wild and nonsensical ways. I mean, this is California. But I have a hard time understanding how a library is supposed to operate if it can’t remove books over content issues. How did the books get in the library to begin with? If they had a volume of a decade of Playboy issues, would librarians be able to remove it based on the content?
I’m told Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico is in play here. Continue reading So What If School Library Dumps Christian Books?
Gregory Wolfe observes, “If the Bible is a closed feedback loop – read me but read nothing else – then sign me up for another religion. I think it’s saying the opposite: read me faithfully and you will be equipped to read everything. If scripture doesn’t send you out into the world with curiosity and compassion, then it’s not from God.”
He answers three quick questions here as a preface to speaking at the Word and Words Conference at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
“The word ‘home’ raised a smile in us all three,
And one repeated it, smiling just so
That all knew what he meant and none would say.” – Edward Thomas
Did everyone actually know what he meant, or could it be everyone thought they knew and didn’t want to articulate it? Trying to say what you think you know is a good way of learning whether you really know it. Can we ever return home once we’ve left? Is home a reality that can be returned to? I remember talking to a woman about the conflict she risked in her native country. She was glad to be away from it all, but she also longed to return there. That’s where her home was.
Home is where we fit in, but some of us are so dogged by internal or external pain that we don’t actually fit in anywhere with a clean snap. We just hold our place well enough; we appear to flow with the rest of the pattern. Is home where our family is? If so, who is our family? That’s as big a question as the definition of home. Both are subjects in John Michael Cummings’ new dramatic novel, Don’t Forget Me, Bro (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Dec. 2014).
The story is told by Mark Barr, who returns to his Alma, West Virginia, home after receiving the call that his eldest brother, Steve, has died. Steve was declared mentally ill many years ago, and no one in the family seems to know how to deal with him. He died at age 45. At one point, he was a runner with aspirations of living a long, creative life.
“Forty-five was for car accident victims and the terminally ill,” Mark says. “Steve would be so ashamed. I was glad he wasn’t alive to know he was dead.”
But Mark hadn’t talked to his brother for years before they spoke on the phone last week, and he hasn’t kept up with his other brother or their parents. It has been 11 years since he last visited, and he felt the same today as he did back then—he wanted to get out. Alma and the surrounding mountains were haunted with ugly memories of choices Mark had made and experiences he’d suffered. If this was the place where he fit in, he hated the picture it made.
“All around me,” Mark drones, “mountains were streaked brown like stained commodes, and skeleton-shell barns flashed by, as if retreating. In that moment, I felt that this land had never stopped waiting for me to return, that like an enemy, it had me for life.”
Cummings sustains a good tension throughout this family drama. Continue reading “Don’t Forget Me, Bro,” by John Michael Cummings
It’s Banned Books Week again, friends, that wonderful time of year when parents and teachers pull out their cardigans and gather to discuss serious complaints and differences of opinion over mugs of hot apple cider. When we drink cider in America, we think of censorship. Isn’t that right?
This year we have a delightful book about the Islamic Revolution in Iran called Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Parents in Murphy, Oregon, have objected to the language and violent content in the book at their Three Rivers School Board meeting. When one parent was allowed to read from Persepolis, a board member stopped him because he didn’t think the language was appropriate for the meeting, which helped make the parent’s point.
Curiously enough, Chicago public schools pulled the book last year, which provoked parents and teachers to react in support of it. Copies of the book were reportedly taken from schools, and even Chicago’s mayor said he would investigate the reason. They have since rescinded its complete removal. The school CEO asks that it not be taught to seventh graders.
None of this is censorship, friends. I don’t know why Chicago wanted to yank this book, and I’m willing to believe the worst about their intentions, but that doesn’t mean the parents in Murphy don’t have good ones. Both of these things are beside the point. Objecting to a book’s placement on a reading list is not calling for it to be banned. Asking for more parental consent when assigning difficult or morally objectionable material is not a book burning party. It’s democracy and many other things as well.
City Hall is a full block of rough stone with a thick finger pointing up at God. It’s like something that was left standing after wind and water wore away the weaker stone. Used to be purple, but it wears a coat of coal dust like most of the buildings downtown. A thing of glory when it went up, but forty years of cops and politicians will rub the polish off the nicest cuspidor.
That’s Minneapolis City Hall. I know it well – I used to work about two blocks away, but about 25 years after 1947, the time of this novel.
James Lileks, who’s rather popular in these parts (speaking both culturally and geographically) is producing a series of mystery novels set in Minneapolis over a period of decades. They’re not coming out in chronological order, for reasons which will doubtless be made clear in the fullness of time. The first book, Graveyard Special, which I reviewed here, was amusing but perhaps not entirely successful. The new one is Casablanca Tango, and I think it’s even better, though not perfect.
The Casablanca, to which the title alludes, is a bar across the street from the Citizen-Herald, the newspaper where the narrator works. The narrator is John Crosley, a photographer, who plays Watson to the Holmes of Harold Holman, ace reporter. They’re both veterans recently back from WWII. They’re the first on the scene when several men and a girl are murdered in the Casablanca one day. Three lines have been drawn with blood on the girl’s forehead. Soon after, another girl is murdered, with four red lines drawn on her body, and soon the police are on the hunt for a serial killer. But Harold and John are curious about mob ties and a political plan to raze the Gateway District, a run-down downtown neighborhood.
The greatest pleasure of The Casablanca Tango is the immense amount of research Mr. Lileks has put in to recreating a city only barely recognizable today (the clearing of the Gateway District here was just the start). Even if you don’t know Minneapolis, you’ll feel like you visited it. He mentions more than one restaurant I ate in myself, decades later but before the concrete wave of redevelopment obliterated them.
The writing and dialogue are good, and there’s an authentic hard-boiled flavor to them (“I’ve seen flies land on eyes that had more life than hers”). Unfortunately the author seems to lose sight of the forest for the trees sometimes – he has a disconcerting way of losing track of his characters’ hair color, for instance (he describes one woman in a single sentence as being a blonde with black hair). He introduces a peripheral character named “Cecil,” who is obviously standing in for Cedric Adams, a newspaper columnist and broadcaster who pretty much owned the town in those days (I remember him). Then, about half-way through the book he drops the pseudonym and Cecil openly becomes Cedric. He also identifies Hawthorne as the poet of the “Song of Hiawatha.” He really needed an editor, or at least a better one.
I’ll say this though — the culprit was not who I expected, and not who most writers would have fingered.
On balance I give The Casablanca Tango four stars. It’s as good a voyage through time as you’re going to get for $3.99