Fiction

The Initial Outrage at "The Lottery"

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Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery,” begins like this:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

It’s a chilling tale, you may remember, and if you don’t, you can read it all here. I didn’t remember the first outrage to it back in 1948. “‘The Lottery’ was met with much negativity which surprised both the author and The New Yorker, and ultimately caused many subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and send hate mail.”

Nowadays, they tell the same moral in children’s movies. I remember Rabbit in one of the clumsier Winnie the Pooh movies singing about following the map over your own eyes. Ignore your senses; follow tradition and the book–which was to say how ridiculous it is to follow anything but your own senses. But Miss Jackson may have intended far more than that in “The Lottery.” Her NY Times obit states:

“Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.

In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story’s mood.”

Music

A Word to Hymn-Writers

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The great musician Fernando Ortega gives a bit of advice to hymn writers: happy church songs don’t stick to your ribs. Work on that next hymn in the light of some specific imagery or drama from the Scriptures. Ortega notes: “It’s easy to write a chorus that says:

God, you are a Holy God

I need your grace to see me through

I need your mercy to make me new

Let me live each day for you.

I just made that up in two minutes and there’s nothing wrong with it. It might fit easily and competitively among the hundreds of worship songs that are available to choose from. But compare those lines to the third stanza from the above hymn:

Let holy charity mine outward vesture be,

And lowliness become mine inner clothing;

True lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part,

And o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.”

Non-fiction

The Lost Carthage

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Carthage RuinsThe art and history of Carthage isn’t as well known as we would like, because an ancient mob boss put the hit on them. Ed Voves reviews Richard Miles’ book Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, which “has uncovered the story of ancient Carthage, the Semitic civilization which flourished in its North African home city and in colonies all over the western Mediterranean until it was conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C.” Voves writes:

“Carthage, however, was not merely conquered by Rome. As the title of Miles’ book asserts, Carthage was destroyed. In three brutal wars, Carthage’s military power was annihilated by the legions of the Roman Republic. The city was ransacked and burned, down to its foundations. The people of Carthage were massacred or enslaved. The literature of the city was put to the torch. Not a stone was left upon a stone.”

Looks like a great book for ancient history readers.

Reading

"We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue."

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“I believe the novel is a moral form. We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue. Through the tales fashioned by thoughtful writers we discover or reaffirm what we believe to be right and good. Our eternal subject is the nature of the well-lived life. So here’s a theory of what has happened to the middle classes and the novel. A hundred years or so ago the language of idealism changed. As Christianity fractured, the imagination of those who wanted to make a better world was seized by a new idealism: socialism. In this new understanding of society the working class had virtue and was the future; the middle class had power and was the past. Bourgeois values came to be seen as vices. The middle-class consumers of art and literature gradually found themselves cast in negative terms, as exploitative, parasitic and reactionary.

By the last decades of the 20th century, as these perceptions became the orthodoxy of the educated elite, writers and artists found they faced a fork in the road.” Read the rest

Fiction, Reviews

Blind Pursuit, by Michael Prescott

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I found Blind Pursuit by Michael Prescott a very satisfying thriller. It’s one of those out-of-print novels that has begun to show up cheap in e-book format. I’ve had some good surprises with those.

The main characters are twin sisters, Erin and Annie Reilly, one a psychologist and the other a flower shop owner, who live in Tucson. The action starts fast with Erin’s abduction in the night.

Because the author follows her in the car trunk after she is taken, I was worried I was going to have to watch her murder, and I was ready to drop the book if that happened (I have a low tolerance for the on-stage killing of women). But the kidnapper’s plans for Erin are much more complicated than a simple sex killing. His plot is almost (not quite) beneficent and admirable, and his motives are a complex tangle that gets sorted out strategically for the reader, the enlightenment increasing with the dramatic tension.

The characters intrigue, the suspense is genuine, and there’s even a nice twist at the end. Also there’s romance for the ladies.

I enjoyed Blind Pursuit, and recommend it for adult readers.

Non-fiction

But What Is a Press Release?

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Joel Pollak points out the differences between Random House’s initial press release for The Rogue and the one this week. Back then, the author “will be highly respectful of his subject’s privacy as he investigates her public activities,” like years-old family affairs. This week, “The Rogue delves deeply into Alaska’s political and business affairs and Palin’s political, personal, and family life..” I’m glad Random House isn’t publishing exposés about people who are actually in or running for office, because that would be so dull. As for McGuinniss, he should probably get a real job and read Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University in his off time.

Uncategorized

This is me, being flexible

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A couple nights every week, my renter plonks himself down in front of my desktop computer in the dining room, and dominates it for a few hours around suppertime. Although he has his own computer and is on my network, he claims this old, slow Dell handles certain streaming downloads better than his does. So I have to wait, because I’m passive.

Tonight was one of those nights. It’s also bill-paying night on my schedule. And since I’m going to be gone next Thursday, I had to pay two weeks’ worth of bills. So I overcame my OCD enough to do the bills before I blogged, rather than after, as is my custom.

And this is what I blogged. Just to show you how flexible I am.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture