Bookselling, Poetry, Uncategorized

Winter Quiet, New Bookstores, and Libraries Disposing of Printed Resources

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It’s been cold this week. We even had a bit of wintery precipitation, which we call snow around here, but you probably have real snow in your area and would laugh at us for using the same word to refer to whatever that was in the air a minute ago. It’s winter here. With current events as they are, it feels like winter everywhere.

Contemporary Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan wrote in his poem, “A bridge used to be there, someone recalled,” these lines about muddling through.

He recalled the city he’d escaped from,
the scorched terrain he searched by hand.
He recalled a weeping man
saved by the squad.

Life will be quiet, not terrifying.
He should have returned a while ago.
What could happen to him, exactly?
What could happen?

The patrol will let him through,
and god will forgive.
God’s got other things to do.

Winter can feel like that. Quiet enough to allow you to push back both real and imagined terrors, worries that the world is leaning into the curse, that God has other things to do. But such feelings belie the hope we have in Christ. As Christina Rossetti wrote in “A Better Resurrection“:

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.

What else to we have today?

Bookstores: Focusing on a new store in Concord, N.C., called Goldberry Books, World magazine reports on the return of small booksellers. “In the last decade, the American Booksellers Association (ABA), a trade organization for independent bookstores, has actually seen steady growth. In 2022, its members operated more than 2,500 locations—up more than 50 ­percent since 2009.”

Libraries: The Vermont State Colleges System intends to divest itself of printed books and offer only digital access by July 1, 2023. Joel Miller talks through how bad that could be. The faculty of three colleges in the state system have pushed back, calling the board of trustees’ decision “reckless.”

Fathers: Ted Kluck talks about his friends’ fathers, who are coming to the end of their lives. “They taught us how to goof off and bust chops and work hard and be generous and stay married. . . . Do they make dads like these anymore?”

Remembering: Joseph Conrad wrote, “The dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.” Patrick Kurp reflects on this as well as Thelonious Monk’s love of the hymn “Abide with Me.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Orphan,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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“This man, he sounds like a force to be reckoned with. And it seems … it seems he got his first taste of wisdom. It can be intoxicating. There’s so much to see that you were blind to before. The problem? He thinks he has it. Wisdom. But no one has it. We just wear it from time to time when we’re lucky.”

I wonder if other people enjoy Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels as much as I do. For this reader, these books are more than well-written. They possess a solidity. A punch. No energy is wasted, just as the hero wastes no energy when he fights: “People think of a superpower as going fast when everyone else moves slow. But that’s not as useful as going slow when everyone else is moving fast.” It could be that I respond viscerally to the character’s OCD, his feelings of alienation, of being separated from the rest of humanity. Or maybe the powerful prose works the same for everybody. The books certainly sell well enough.

The Last Orphan, the latest entry in the series, begins with our hero, Evan Smoak, in Iceland, where he has traveled for no other reason than to sample a local vodka in a bar on a glacier. Vodka is one of Evan’s few, small indulgences – taken in strictly controlled quantities, and only the best. Iceland recurs as a reference point again and again in The Last Orphan, indicating something pure, refined, cold and remote. Evan Smoak’s personal, unachievable ideal for life.

But life is messy, and even Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, the freelance hero no one can find, can’t keep himself out of its mess. In The Last Orphan, a very carefully planned and executed government operation manages (just barely) to capture him. Confined in restraints, he is offered an assignment by the president of the United States herself (she’s a woman in this alternate universe). She wants him to take out an international wheeler dealer named Luke Devine. Luke Devine has pulled political strings to stall an environmental bill the president wants passed. But he also controls dangerous agents suspected of very bad acts. If Evan can eliminate him, she’ll give him a full pardon.

Evan couldn’t care less about the president’s bill, but he soon learns that Devine’s personal security men have been doing some horrific stuff, and seem to be guilty of at least two unsolved murders. Once Evan (with the help of his teenaged hacker ward, a girl named Joey) understands the kind of surveillance power Devine wields, he’ll have to figure out how to keep an innocent family safe as a side job.

There are echoes of The Great Gatsby in the descriptions of the wild parties (actually orgies) Devine holds at his Long Island estate. We get to see how several of the regular series cast members are doing now, which is gratifying. And Evan Smoak, against his will but with a sense of moral obligation, is forced to move a little further out of his protective shell as he attempts to outthink and outmaneuver the most intelligent – and dangerous – adversary he’s ever faced.

The Last Orphan is a wonderful book, expertly written. Author Hurwitz even includes one of my favorite author’s tricks – one that should only be attempted rarely, and by a master – a one-line chapter.

I loved it. I wish it were twice as long.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Crooked Man,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series has often been recommended to me, but I’ve resisted. Not sure why. After reading Crooked Man, I still haven’t made up my mind how I feel about it, but I liked the book better at the end than in the early stages.

Tubby Dubonnet, for those of you who (as I was) are unaware of him, is a divorced criminal lawyer in New Orleans. That in itself suggests he’s no moral paragon, but he does maintain two rules of ethics in his practice – never screw a client, and never lie to a judge. By the standards of the place, that makes him pretty upright.

He has a colorful cast of clients. Right now he’s negotiating a malpractice settlement for a transvestite stripper who got a bad skin-darkening treatment from a doctor, and trying to coax payment for divorce work from a buxom blonde who may be available for a different kind of transaction. But when Darryl Alvarez, a nightclub manager, asks him to keep a locked sports bag in his safe for a couple days (he swears there’s nothing illegal in it), Tubby goes against his own better judgment and accepts it. This soon puts him in an awkward ethical position, not to mention a dangerous one. Tubby is a clever man, and he’ll need all his cleverness to stay alive.

I prefer my heroes a little more principled than Tubby Dubonnet, but by the end of Crooked Man – which was a lighter concoction than I expected – I was enjoying the story. I bought a whole set of the novels, so I’ll be reviewing more.

Non-fiction, Reviews

2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by John C. Lennox

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Professor Joseph McRae Mellichamp of the University of Alabama, speaking at conference at Yale University to an audience that contained the Novel Price winner Sir John Eccles, famous for his discovery of the synapse, together with a number of the pioneers of AI, said: “It seems to me that lot of needless debate could be avoided if AI researchers would admit that there are fundamental differences between machine intelligence and human intelligence — differences that cannot be overcome by any amount of research.” In other words, to cite the succinct title of Mellichamp’s talks, “‘the artificial’ in artificial intelligence is real.”

What was the last thing you heard about artificial intelligence? Maybe it was about ChatGPT, an open AI web app that invites people to ask the computer to write anything they can think of.

Chris Hutchinson on Twitter asked it to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in the style of the psychedelic funk band Sly and the Family Stone. The AI said it would be disrespectful to rewrite such a historic speech in this style. Then he asked for a rewrite of the speech as a haiku, and the AI complied. Later, another user was able to get the speech in the style of Sly and the Family Stone by wording the request differently (and possibly by his preceding requests). Maybe ChatGPT had a change of heart after refusing the first request.

Educators have been worried that this program (and others produced in its wake) will allow students to task their computers with writing papers for them with minimal chance of detection, but educators are prove to worrying and are probably assuming too much AI language proficiency at this point. Writers worry this program threatens their jobs, and those who work for any of the click-bait sites on pop culture, movies, and games should worry. The garbage prose ChatGPT spits out is totally on par with their daily posts.

You won’t find this in Lennox’s book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. It was published in 2020. Developments in this field will be fast and fierce (no, frenetic. Wait, it’s fast and feverish, right? Fulminous?) Lennox couldn’t deal with the very latest news, but he does deal with the ideas and claims many in the field of artificial intelligence are making.

Current advances in AI have sparked hopes and fears similar to George Orwell’s 1984, but instead of INGSOC controlling our society, it would be supercomputers that had developed themselves beyond their creators’ imagination. If it came to reality by 2084, supporters ask, wouldn’t it be poetic?

Lennox explains some of the benefits of current machine learning and some of the changes we see coming as robots take over select jobs. For example, the freight industry could be transformed by trucks that drove themselves. (How would they refuel? Could criminals take advantage of them?) He also explains some of the dangers we can already see in AI’s current uses. China’s surveillance state already looks resembles an episode of Black Mirror in which approved behavior and social media influence controls a society of people constantly monitored by unseeing eyes. Facial recognition programs may violate privacy by design and are only as good as they are accurate. False matches have already gotten a few people in trouble.

Continue reading 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by John C. Lennox →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Guilty Money,’ by David Crosby

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I get the feeling, as I read David Crosby’s Will Harper series, that the author wants to pay homage to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee – Will, after all, lives on a boat in a marina in Florida. Instead of “taking his retirement in installments,” he lives the good life on an inheritance. Frankly, except for the sentiment of the thing, I almost wish he wouldn’t. Will Harper is a very different character from McGee.

In the previous installment, journalist Will saved his neighbors from being fleeced by land developers exploiting eminent domain. His girlfriend Sandy, about whom he was getting serious, rewarded him by sailing away to a new life in the Caribbean.

So as Guilty Money begins, he’s rebuilding his life (along with his boat, which got shot up in the action). He’s also acquired a new girlfriend, a girl who wants no commitment and likes to hang around the boat naked (a curiously 1970s plot element in a 21st Century book). But then a friend asks his help in getting someone out of the jail in nearby (fictional) Grove County. There the sheriff’s department, under financial pressure and tempted by plain greed, is milking the jail system for cash – particularly through failing to notify defendants of court dates, then pocketing the forfeited bail. Also they skimp on prisoners’ food, and brutalize them on top of it. There are one or two deaths, which get covered up.

With the help of a friendly (and attractive) ACLU attorney (she brags about how the ACLU defends people of all political beliefs, another dated element in the story), he plans a campaign to expose the corruption. It will get ugly – and fortunately a new ally appears, a young man who knows how to fight. A much needed addition to this cast.

At least in these early books in the series, author Crosby hasn’t yet mastered his instrument, in my opinion. His prose could use some pruning. And the politics lean left (as you no doubt guessed from this review). The theme of the story is the over-incarceration of criminals — something I’m pretty sure isn’t a problem anymore.

But there’s only one more book in the collection of three that I got for free, so I imagine I’ll read it. Guilty Money wasn’t bad.

Uncategorized

Adventures in Lake Wobegon

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Anoka, Minnesota. Creative Commons license, Tim Kiser.

If you are (or were) a fan of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, you’re familiar with the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

Lake Wobegon is (we are reliably informed) a cover identity for Anoka, Minnesota. Anoka is a northern suburb of Minneapolis today, but it was a quiet rural community when Keillor was growing up. (It also boasts of being the Halloween Capitol of the US, for some reason I haven’t discovered).

Anyway, you may recall Keillor talking about the Sons of Knut lodge in Lake Wobegon. The Sons of Knut are obviously based on the Sons of Norway. And there is indeed a Sons of Norway lodge in Anoka. It’s called, not the Sons of Knut, but “Vennekretsen,” which is Norwegian for “circle of friends.”

I told you all this to sidle around to the fact that I spoke to Vennekretsen Lodge last night. It went great. The people were very kind and hospitable, and receptive to my presentation. They also bought a fair number of books. And they served a great big cake, because it was the 100th birthday of one of the lodge members. Haven’t seen a cake like that in a long time.

Anyway, what I mainly wanted to write about tonight was the adventure of preparing for that event. Because it wasn’t any walk in the park (except in the sense that parks nowadays tend to be places where you’ll get mugged).

When I do a presentation, I generally prepare by rehearsing several times, and also by pulling out things I think I’ll need to take along, and piling them somewhere so I won’t forget them on the date.

What I didn’t expect was that I’d trip on a laptop cord and yank the thing down onto the floor on Sunday. The screen was ruined. I’ve always found it difficult to use a computer without a working screen.

So – although it’s my general policy not to do commercial transactions on a Sunday, but this was an emergency – I ran to Micro Center, the best computer store in these parts, and quickly found several inexpensive laptops there. I had to wait around a while to get sales help, because Sunday’s a big shopping day for people less spiritually-minded than myself. When I finally got hold of a salesman, he actually recommended the least expensive machine on the shelf. “Does everything the others do, and it’s cheaper!” he said. Sounded great to me.

What I hadn’t noticed – and it would have meant nothing to me if it had, because I’m ignorant – was that what I was buying was a Chromebook. I didn’t know (then) that Chromebooks are the Trabants of the computer world, minimalist machines that only do a few things. Perfectly fine for their target market, but I’m not that market.

I even asked the salesman if it would run Microsoft 365, and he said yes. This is technically true, but it will only run it through the Chrome browser. IT IS USELESS FOR TAKING AWAY FROM HOME AND GIVING A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.

I even mentioned to him that I needed a laptop for a PowerPoint presentation. At that point he was (understandably) eager to get rid of me, and he said nothing. I hold him morally culpable for this.

Anyway, I took the thing home and tried to get it set up, growing increasingly frustrated. A couple posts on Facebook got me the information I needed – Chromebook was wrong for me.

On Monday I took the thing back to Micro Center, returned it, and got an HP, which turned out to be pretty much identical to the one I broke.

But I got it set up at last. And I was able to head out on schedule for Lake Wobegon in the evening.

One last insult remained, however. When I got to the church where the lodge met, we found that my new machine would not communicate with the digital projector on site. I ended up having to borrow somebody else’s laptop and run the presentation from a file on a thumb drive (I always bring a backup copy on a thumb drive, because experience has taught me that something always goes wrong). The upshot was that this laptop, which I’d gone to such pains to acquire and prepare, was redundant, and my beautiful, carefully selected title fonts, not loaded on the borrowed machine, did not appear.

Now I’m worrying about projector compatibility in the future.

So it goes in our little town.

Authors, Fiction, Writing

Jonathan Kellerman interview

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Tonight I’m giving one of my lectures, and it’s turning into an adventure (and not in a good way). So this post is scheduled ahead of time, and I’ll tell you all about my travails tomorrow.

Above, a short clip of an interview with Jonathan Kellerman, whose Unnatural History I praised the other day. Enjoy.

Music

Sunday Singing: Rejoice, the Lord Is King!

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“Rejoice, the Lord Is King!” sung by the congregation of Grace Community Church,
Sun Valley, California

The great Charles Wesley gave us today’s hymn. “Rejoice, the Lord Is King!” focuses our attention on his perfect majesty and our glorious hope. The Trinity hymnal has an extra verse, which is also in some of the oldest hymn texts I checked, so I assume Wesley wrote it too.

As a man said on his dying day, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

1 Rejoice, the Lord is King:
Your Lord and King adore!
Rejoice, give thanks and sing,
And triumph evermore.

Refrain: Lift up your heart,
Lift up your voice!
Rejoice, again I say, rejoice!

2 Jesus, the Savior, reigns,
The God of truth and love;
When He has purged our stains,
He took his seat above; [Refrain]

3 His kingdom cannot fail,
He rules o’er earth and heav’n;
The keys of death and hell
Are to our Jesus giv’n: [Refrain]

4 He sits at God’s right hand
’til all his foes submit,
and bow to his command,
and fall beneath his feet. [Refrain]

5 Rejoice in glorious hope!
Our Lord and judge shall come
And take His servants up
To their eternal home: [Refrain]

Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Publishing

Southern Hospitality and Artificial Translation

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Recently I had a conversation about something related to Southern culture, and a friend originally from another state asked me to define Southern hospitality. Having lived in the South my whole life, I was disappointed I couldn’t say more than I did. I have actually read a bit about manners and what it means to be Southern. I still know a thing or two about the history of the English language in the South, but I couldn’t define this hospitality thing.

It would be easy, if you took a superficial route. You could say Southern hospitality is fried chicken, corn bread, and iced tea, but that isn’t essentially different than, say, krauts and beer or hot dish and dinner rolls. (What do Midwesterners drink with a casserole? I always drink water, but I know I’m supposed to be drinking tea.)

Southern Living lists six qualities of Southern hospitality in this article from earlier this year: politeness, good home cooking, kindness, helpfulness, charm, and charity. I’m going to call this a puff piece (and maybe the whole magazine is too). This is the kind of thing we say about ourselves no matter who we are. Dang! If we ain’t the best, you know it? But if these are true as Southern characteristics, not Christian characteristics, then it demonstrates that Christ still haunts the South.

That’s part of what I said to my friend. I have a hard time distinguishing Christian hospitality from Southern or Yankee or any other kind of hospitality you might define. The differences seem only superficial b/c the virtue is found in Christ.

And maybe Southern hospitality is what it is because we’ve had the best branding.

In other news, Artificial Intelligence already works on video captioning and language translation. Now, a Japanese student of the Korean language has won translation award by editing an AI translation of a webtoon. She doesn’t know Korean enough to translate the work herself, but using AI and research tools, she got through it well enough to win Rookie of the Year from LTI Korea.

Kim Wook-dong, emeritus professor of English Literature and Linguistics at Sogang University, told The Korea Herald that AI can translate technical writing “almost perfectly,” but is has “limits in capturing the subtle emotions, connotations and nuances in literary translations. It can help and serve as an assistant to translators but AI cannot replace humans in literary translation. I doubt it ever will.” [via The Literary Saloon]

Normal Living, Extraordinary Prose: “Clean-shaved and conservatively dressed, with no oddities of posture or gait, he should have merged imperceptibly into a street crowd. But he didn’t. He stuck out, for reasons almost impossible to capture and fix in words. The best one can say is that he stood and walked and talked like other men, only more so. He was conspicuously normal.” 

This description from H.L. Mencken reminds me of H. Matisse in Ray Bradbury’s story about “a terrifyingly ordinary man.”

Poetry: The great Dana Gioia has a new collection of poems called Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Photo by Sunira Moses on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Cold Winter,’ by Colin Conway

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I stood and shoved my hands back into my pockets but left my coat open. The cold worked its way inside and nipped at the lightly covered areas of my body. I didn’t pull the long coat closed, though. I wanted to feel something other than the hurt inside.

I enjoy a good thriller. Writers like Hurwitz, Klavan, and Hunter stand among my favorites. And yet, for preference, I personally can do without all the fights and explosions. I like the mystery itself, and the interplay of characters. Some people enjoy being scared; they’re probably braver than I.

My point is that a novel that emphasizes mystery and character over action suits me just fine. And that’s what The Long Cold Winter by Colin Conway has to offer.

Dallas Nash is a police detective in Tacoma, Washington. It’s early winter, and his mood is as bleak as the weather. He’s mourning his wife Bobbie, who died just before Thanksgiving in a single-car accident. The hopelessness and futility of it all has unmanned him. He visits her grave every day, and lately he’s been waking up with old songs in his head. Some of them are his favorites, some Bobbie’s favorites. Some he can’t even place. He’s begun to wonder if they’ve been sent as messages from Bobbie. He’s begun to wonder if he’s losing his mind.

He goes back to work, not because he feels ready, but because he can’t handle the inactivity anymore. When he gets to the office, he finds a cold case file on his desk. The brass have decided that’s a good way to ease him back into the job.

The case is the murder of a high school student, Jennifer Williams, back in 1987. This sparks a memory in Dallas. He saw Jennifer on the day she died. He was cruising the main street with some highs chool friends, and a friend of a friend pointed to her and said she was his girlfriend. Oddly, that guy is not mentioned in the police reports.

Here’s a fresh angle on the case. In intervals from investigating another, fresher, murder that also occurs, Dallas will have to reconnect with old acquaintances to locate the guy, whose name he’s forgotten. He’ll make mistakes, and there will be more deaths. But the truth will come out.

I expect some people won’t care for Detective Nash’s depression, and some would prefer more action on-stage (the deaths here generally happen out of sight. Dallas tends to get his confessions through quiet conversation). But I enjoyed A Long Cold Winter very much, and I recommend it.

Cautions for adult themes and language. There’s a priest in the book, and he’s treated positively.