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What I did on my summer vacation

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I’m taking a week of vacation this week. So far I haven’t done much, except get started with my second summer grad school class, about which more anon.

[Isn’t “anon” a wonderful word? Evocative, useful, and likely to get you punched in the face if you ever speak it in real life.]

Anyway, the City of Robbinsdale made a point of messing with my schedule. Last week I got notice that they were going to turn the water off in my neighborhood from 9:00 to 4:00 on Monday, weather permitting, to work on infrastructure, whatever that is. So I planned for the shut-off, and then it rained all day. Thus the great California Emulation was moved to today.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m reluctant to spend seven hours in a place without a working toilet. So I determined to go somewhere where clean and sober transients are welcome, and toilets are plentiful – America’s most pointless tourist attraction, the Mall of America.

I haven’t used my cane in weeks, but I brought it with me today, knowing I’d be walking more than I have for more than a year. I hobbled around and rested at intervals, and made it through OK.

I hadn’t been to the Mall in years. I was surprised at how boring I found it. Perhaps it’s old age, and being out of touch with the times, but I saw little that didn’t look to me like fashion-driven, disposable gimcrackery. I suppose I felt some kind of Puritan snobbery, a judgmentalism that comes from a place less than virtuous. But I didn’t see the point. Continue reading What I did on my summer vacation →

Authors

Williams: “Arguably the Finest Afro-American Novelist of His Generation”

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The NY Times has a obituary on John A. Williams (1925-2015), whom they called a strong but perpetually underrated novelist. He died July 3 at age 89.

His 1967 bestselling novel The Man Who Cried I Am is about a black novelist in Europe, struggling with the world, his own marriage, and an American friend of his. One Goodreads reviewer says, “This should be much more of an African-American classic than it is. I’d never even heard of it. The writing is excellent, simple but always appropriate, never pat. Although it is a novel about a novelist, and his relationship with another novelist, it never feels overly literary or self-referential.” In the NY Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith said it is “a compelling novel, gracefully written, angry but acute, committed but controlled, obviously timely, but deserving of attention for far more than that.”

His second novel, Night Song, appears to have opened him up for insult. William Grimes says Williams impressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which “unanimously recommended him for a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In an unprecedented decision, the Rome academy rejected the selection, offering no explanation. Mr. Williams said he believed himself to be the victim of a false rumor that he was about to marry a white woman. He was offered a $2,000 grant instead, which he rejected.”

Williams graduated in 1950 from Syracuse University, where his professors encouraged him to pursuing writing.

“Mr. Williams, whom the critic James L. de Jongh called ‘arguably the finest Afro-American novelist of his generation,’ excelled in describing the inner lives of characters struggling to make sense of their experiences, their personal relationships and their place in a hostile society,” Grimes writes. “His manifest gifts, however, earned him at best a twilight kind of fame — a reputation for being chronically underrated.”

Authors, Writing

Awake at Night with an Active Mind

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Writer and world traveler Karen Emslie writes about waking up in the middle of the night and how it may be a good time for creative play.

March 15, 2011It is true that when I wake at 4am I have a whirring mind. . . . If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next – like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse. I will work for several hours and then go back to bed. . . .

Indeed, when [Nicholson] Baker was writing what would become A Box of Matches (2003), a novel about a writer who gets up around 4am, lights a fire and writes while his family sleeps, Baker himself practised this ritual, then went back to bed for a second sleep.

‘I found that starting and nurturing this tiny early flame helped me to concentrate,’ Baker told The Paris Review. ‘There’s something simple and pleasantly meditative about building a fire at four in the morning. I started writing disconnected passages, and the writing came easily.’

Authors, Fiction

Dune at 50

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Herbert was a quintessential product of the libertarian culture of the Pacific coast, self-reliant and distrustful of centralised authority, yet with a mile-wide streak of utopian futurism and a concomitant willingness to experiment. He was also chronically broke. During the period he wrote Dune, his wife Beverly Ann was the main bread-winner, her own writing career sidelined by a job producing advertising copy for department stores.

… The prevailing publishing wisdom of the time had it that SF readers liked their stories short. Dune (400 pages in its first hardcover edition, almost 900 in the paperback on my desk) was rejected by more than 20 houses before being accepted by Chilton, a Philadelphia operation known for trade and hobby magazines such as Motor Age, Jewelers’ Circular and the no-doubt-diverting Dry Goods Economist.

“By rights,” Hari Kunzru writes, “Dune ought to have become a big movie. An attempt by the visionary Chilean film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky to bring it to the screen became one of the great “what if” stories of SF cinema…. But Jodorowsky’s prog-tastic project was strangled in the crib by risk-averse Hollywood producers.”

But the story actually did make it to the big screen–as the movie Star Wars. “Herbert knew he’d been ripped off, and thought he saw the ideas of other SF writers in Lucas’s money-spinning franchise. He and a number of colleagues formed a joke organisation called the We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society.”

Authors, Writing

Too Fun to Quibble

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Sherlock Holmes on Baker StreetMartin Edwards follows his nose from one clue to another within The Detection Club, a London dinner society of British detective fiction writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and R. Austin Freeman.

Edwards crams many facts into this work, but his primary goal is “to refute the charge of ‘cozy’ that has hung over the Golden Age writers since a rebellious Englishman named Raymond Chandler moved to California and took to the pages of the Atlantic Monthly to denounce the whole project of British detective fiction in a famous 1944 essay called ‘The Simple Art of Murder.'”

Joseph Bottum concludes, “Of course, the actual argument of The Golden Age of Murder is almost beside the point. The book is too enjoyable, too enthusiastic, to live or die by the success of its thesis.” (via Prufrock)

Authors, Music, Religion

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

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Charge!

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Or is it something else?

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a wonderfully catchy tune that many have sung on the Fourth and even in church, because it talks about God’s truth marching forward, right? Just like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” isn’t it?

The writer, Julia Ward Howe, was a Unitarian, poet, and active supporter of abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and education. Her public support of these issues was opposed by her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, and put a strain on their marriage for years. He wanted her to keep her work domestic. When she published a book of poetry anonymously (but discovered a short time afterward), Samuel felt betrayed.

In November 1861, Samuel and Julia were visiting Union encampments close to Washington, D.C. as part of a presidential commission. Some of the men began singing, and one of their songs was “John Brown’s Body,” a song in praise of the violent abolitionist John Brown.

“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave
But his soul goes marching on.

“He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord,
His soul goes marching on.”

Reverend James Freeman Clarke was touring with the Howes and remarked that while the tune was great, the lyric could be stronger. He suggested Julia write new words to it, and she replied that she had had a similar idea. Continue reading The Battle Hymn of the Republic →

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

How Dante Saved Dreher from Depression

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Last year, we wrote about Rod Dreher’s book, How Dante Can Save Your Life,, noting that following your heart will kill you dead and sin is a damaged form of love.

Chris Fabry interviewed Rod about his experience going through depression, attempting to reconcile with his family, and learning more from Dante than his counselor. If you haven’t read his book already, this will give you insight into what you’ll find there.

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

The Fellowship of the Inklings

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The Eagle and Child

“In general, the all-male group shared a longing for that half-imaginary time before man’s alienation from God, nature and self, the time before the chaos and materialism of the post-industrial era had displaced the elegantly organized cosmos of the Middle Ages. In their ­various ways, each hoped to spearhead a rehabilitation, a re-enchantment of our fallen world.” Michael Dirda reflects on The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. He says the book focuses largely on the men’s religious lives and thoughts.

The Fellowship looks to be a great, detailed introduction to Barfield and Williams, two men close to Lewis and Tolkien but unfamiliar to most of their fans.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Black,’ and ‘Black is Back,’ by Russell Blake

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When I started reading the first book in Russell Blake’s detective series, Black, I was frankly not much impressed. The main character and his situation seemed hackneyed and glib. But I gave it a chance, and soon decided that there’s a whole lot more going on with these books than was initially apparent, and now I’m a fan.

Artemus Black (he tries to avoid his first name) is a low rent PI in the stereotypical shabby Los Angeles office. He has an office assistant, Roxie, a hot goth chick with superior research and hacking skills, who is reliably insolent to him. He also has an obese, rescued “office cat,” who hates him. He’s seeing a psychologist to help him work through his anger issues – anger at his hippie parents who, although stoned most of the time, keep turning their arts and crafts into wildly profitable businesses, and at his ex-wife who, back when he was a rock musician, recorded an album of songs he wrote and then left him to become an international star, taking all the song rights with her. He drives a classic Cadillac El Dorado convertible, and wears 1940s suits and fedoras. He drinks too much and is trying to quit smoking.

The first book is simply called Black, and involves Black being hired by an aging action movie star with a particular hatred for the paparazzi. Now paparazzi are getting murdered wherever the star goes, and suspicion is being directed at him.

The second book, Black is Back, deals with murder in the rap music scene.

What’s best about the Black books is the characters and the dialogue. Black’s arguments with Roxie are masterpieces of emotional manipulation and veiled sexual tension. His dialogues with his cop friend, Stan Colt, are just hilarious guy talk – cross-chat that’s never been done better in print.

There are some surprisingly beautiful descriptive passages. Russell Blake is an excellent writer. Also some moments when Black exhibits some pretty solid moral sense.

Highly recommended. Cautions for violence, language, and adult stuff, but not really very heavy.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture