“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare acheivement,” said cartooning giant Bill Watterson back in 1990. Those words are wonderfully illustrated by Zen Pencils’ Gavin Aung Than. It’s stirring. I don’t know how I could follow this advice, but Watterson’s personal example makes some sense.
What do you think?
See pictures of 19th century fore-edge painting on the fanned pages of four books in a series on seasons by Robert Mudie.
I just finished a free ebook version (functional formatting and scattered erroneous letters) of P.G. Wodehouse’s trans-Atlantic rom-com Jill the Reckless. It was published in 1921 in the United Kingdom after a couple serializations, under the name, The Little Warrior, in American and Canadian magazines the year before. To cut to the chase, I enjoyed it overall, but I can’t say I lapped it up.
Jill, a delightful young lady with far more impetuous bravado than ladies usually indulge at her age, is the focus on Sir Derek Underhill’s affections and anxiety. He loves her, but he’s worried his mother will not accept her. Derek’s close friend and life-long admirer, Freddie Rooke, understands the unyielding terror that Derek’s mother is and hopes to rally round his friend to support him against this maternal fiend. No, it doesn’t go well. Well is precisely how it doesn’t go, but that isn’t the event that turns Lady Underhill against Jill. That event occurs later that evening when a theatre burns to the ground and Jill, becoming separated from the Underhills, ends up dining with another man a couple tables away from her finance.
That’s the first half of act one, so there’s a lot more to love. In acts two and three, Wodehouse draws us into the world of musical theater, where most managers are human and no one expects to be treated fairly. Wodehouse worked in this world with some famous names, so I can’t help thinking he is revealing some of his personal experiences. His description of the office boy species sounds informed by an explorer’s chronicle.
I say I didn’t lap it all up, because this work doesn’t carry the light-hearted air consistently throughout. At a couple points, it gets rather serious. I can’t say I have any favorite scenes, though Bill the Parrot’s Big Adventure comes to mind. Still it’s as charming reading as I’m sure Jill is herself. If you don’t mind paying for it, I recommend the print version for ease of use.
I’ve read, and reviewed, one previous Steve Dancy western adventure/mystery by James D. Best – Murder at Thumb Butte. I found it a well-written tale with good, but somewhat irritating, characters.
The Return, another Dancy story, is another well-written tale. But it turned me off the series, not because of the writing, but because of one of the themes.
Although technically a western, The Return is actually set mostly in New York City. In the first, shorter section of the story, Steve and his friend Jeff Sharp are closing out their business in Leadville, Colorado. They’ve made a lot of money, and now they want to go east to see their friend Edison, hoping to secure distribution rights for his electric lights for use in mining. They have a little trouble – the kind you handle with a gun – before they go, but they take care of that with the help of Virginia Baker, a storekeeper with whom Steve finds himself, unexpectedly, in love.
Going home, they find that Edison is having some trouble with sabotage in his project to electrify a section of New York City. With the help of Virginia and their old Pinkerton friend, McAllen, they start investigating, and soon find themselves in danger.
It was a subplot of The Return that irritated me. Dancy is the son of a wealthy New York family, and his surviving parent, his mother, is a tremendous snob on top of being deeply involved in political corruption. She is shocked that Steve is sharing a hotel room with Virginia, and the author devotes a fair amount of time to making sure we know how hypocritical and judgmental her attitude is. Steve’s ability to defy her through premarital cohabitation is presented as a sort of moral triumph.
I’m too old-fashioned for that kind of newfangled, Victorian morality.
In The Rabbit Room, Jeffrey Overstreet talks about quitting his dream jobs in order to make time to telling good stories. “It was surprising and disillusioning to discover that, even if you publish a four-book epic fantasy series and earn a spotlight on Barnes and Noble’s ‘Notable Fiction’ displays, you’re not going to find the bills much easier to pay,” he says.
“It’s time to clean the slate and start over. I need to “go back to Square One” and rediscover the ability to dream.”
The first time I watched Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s most recent (after a twelve-year hiatus) film, I thought it was very funny and full of great, surreal dialogue (Stillman’s characters talk like people in books, but then so do I, so I feel right at home), but I wasn’t sure it succeeded as a total work of art. After a second viewing, and a third with the commentary track on, I’m now convinced that it actually works very well, taken on its own terms. In fact, it’s now my favorite of Stillman’s movies.
The film (set, like much of Stillman’s work, in a universe a little loosely moored in time) starts with Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a transfer student, enrolling at Seven Oaks College in New York State. She meets the Girls With Flower Names, and accepts their offer to let her move in with them. Their leader is Violet (Greta Gerwig), who speaks with great conviction and eloquence, and is wrong in almost every factual statement she makes. But she has a great heart, and has devoted her life to helping others. She and her friends run a campus suicide prevention center, where they offer donuts and tap dancing lessons to the clinically depressed. Her great dream is to benefit mankind by starting a dance craze, like the Charleston or the Twist. She prefers to date guys who are neither especially good looking nor especially bright, feeling she can help them achieve their potential, if any. Continue reading Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'
Scanning new sci-fi titles, I feel someone’s eyes on me, but I am alone in the aisle. The books near me begin beeping and flashing. Are these interactive novels? A metal hand grabs at my finger. Eyes on tentacles spring from the novels at my feet, a gurgling cry at my back! I dash out through waving space gloves.
Between the aisles, I catch my breath.
Maybe I can find something to read among the thrillers.
Ten tiny books for your marveling.
This one with a secret compartment is from a seller of handmade dollhouse items.
I suppose it’s about time I started acting responsibly. I’m in my sixth decade, after all.
The other day I was offered this tremendous opportunity to lecture again on a Scandinavian cruise. As you may recall, I’ve lectured on a couple Norwegian cruises in the past, under contract with a company that allows you to buy your cruise at fifty bucks a day (now it’s $65), and you have to pay your own air fare. Not a way to get rich, but if you have a little money to spend it’s an inexpensive way to cruise.
This would have been the cruise of my dreams. Departure from Southampton, England, then oversea to Iceland. Then Norway and the other Scandinavian countries. It would have been the longest cruise I ever did, and an opportunity to lecture comprehensively on all the Viking stuff I’ve learned. And see places I’ve never seen, as long as places I hunger to see again.
But I turned it down, of course. I don’t have much money now, and anyway embarkation is September 1. I have to participate in Student Orientation at our Bible School on Sept. 2.
On top of that, that’s the week I start online classes for my graduate work in Library Science.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, poet Seamus Heaney said, “The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”
Heaney, 74, died this morning just prior to a medical procedure.
Ireland Taoiseach Enda Kenny said, “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people.”
This article quotes a 1995 Irish Times piece on Heaney’s publishing success: “Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’”
You can hear the poet reading or reciting some of his poems here.