Monday. Monday

Rochester Michigan at Christmas. It is lit up for blocks.

I lost my power again on Saturday and had to stay over night with a friend. This is the sixth time in the last nine months and further confirms that I need to move. So I will look in a few months. I will be farther away from some great friends, but hopefully I will make some new ones. Pragmatism must rule.

Listening to a lot of Johnny Greenway music since I heard his score for Power of the Dog, which is my pick for the best movie I saw this year. Although Passing was awfully close and there are quite a few I haven't seen. So weird that both of them were on Netflix. How things have changed.

Reading Heron Cry by Ann Cleeves, the second in a new series. Also essays by Ann Patchett. 

Tried the new Sex and the City show, which was pretty ridiculous. Still I cried when Big died. They've added a lot of characters that may be of darker skin but are still pretty homogeneous. Waiting to watch the last Succession tonight. What a piece there was in The New Yorker about Jeremy Strong. He is a bit bonkers. 

What about you?

FFB-Stephen Sondheim: A Life, Meryle Secrest

The good news: I do not have to have chemo. The bad new: I can't get in for radiation until sometime in January so California is pouf. Watch out, I may turn up on your doorstep if you live in a warm climate.

I am not quite done this but it's the only older book I have been reading. And it is terrific. Ms. Seceste wrote a book on Leonard Bernstein before this so she was primed for Stephen. 

Sondheim was born to rich parents who had little time for their son or each other. But his life took a big turn when his now divorced mother bought a house down the road from Oscar Hammerstein in Doylestown, PA. Sondheim was like a second son to the Hammersteins and wanted to be as much like his surrogate father as possible and certainly succeeded. He went to fine schools and colleges and by twenty-five was writing the lyrics for West Side Story. It was pretty much pure success after that. Yes, there were disappointments (Merrily We Roll Along) but even that has many lives after its original bust. People are now comparing him to Shakespeare as far as his impact on culture. His mentorship of singers, writers, composers is amazing. 

I have to admit I still don't understand why some of his songs are so beloved-I think I have a very conventional ear-but others like Send in the Clowns, I can see. You can see pretty much everything he has done on you tube. Especially great is his ninetieth birthday celebration. May we all die like Sondheim-going to two of your own works and having a great Thanksgiving dinner.

I Scream, You Scream

This looks very similar to the refrigerator I grew up with. Notice the freezer section. There was room  for two ice cube trays and a package or two of meat. So there was never any ice cream on hand. During the school year, we went to store selling ice cream after church on Sunday. My father always tried (and for the rest of his life) to get butterscotch ice cream. If they tried to persuade him on butter pecan or rum raisin he usually refused it. I remember walking the length of the boardwalk in Ocean City, N.J. looking for butterscotch.

My mother went for butter almond (not butter pecan) which seems to have disappeared in the fifties.  My favorite was black raspberry. Only Jeff, my brother, varied but mostly he got vanilla fudge. So my parents were often frustrated by their substitutions as we stood outside (my father was obsessed with keeping the car clean) and licked our cones as quickly as we could. Nothing like being cold to make ice cream less desirable. This flipped in the summer when we stood outside in the heat after church, the ice cream sliding down the cone faster than we could lick. No one ever got in a cup. I am not sure why.

In the summer, three ice cream vendors came by: Mr. Softee, Jack and Jill and Good Humor. You never knew what order they would come in so waiting for your favorite could be a mistake. Jack and Jill had the plainest offerings, mostly popsicles and dixie cups. Mr. Softee was predictably soft serve ice cream. Good Humor was the best and the most expensive. There wasn't always money enough for the best or even any of them sometimes. But the waiting game was torturous when you were headed inside a row house at ten, with no air conditioning or even a fan for many years. 

It took me a long time to realize that actually I often didn't feel that great after eating ice cream. I had been raised on goat's milk and apparently no one thought ice cream might not be a good thing for someone who had trouble with cow's milk. 

When I met Phil (who always ordered vanilla!) there was a store next to his Dad's store that sold exotic flavors before other stores did.New Hope was a tourist town and this store was one of the reasons.

The line to buy ice cream from Gerenser's in New Hope, PA was a half an hour wait. They made their own ice cream and it was worth getting a stomach ache now and then. I remember taking my parents there and the delight on both of their faces when both butterscotch and butter almond were on the menu.  Those were ordinary flavors to a store that offered Princeton Tiger Tail, Cherries for George, African Violet and Ukranian Rose Petal. 

Oh for those simple pleasures. 

What is your favorite ice cream and did you have a place you always went?

Short Story Wednesday: THE SWIMMER, John Cheever

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/07
/18/the-swimmer 

 

After watching the film, THE SWIMMER, a few days ago. I decided to go back and reread the short story. The film was made by Frank Perry in 1968 from a script by his wife who often worked with him in film projects. The movie starred Burt Lancaster in a stunning performance. 

THE SWIMMER is a very surreal story and it is amazing to me that the film captured that so well. Ned is a man in his late fifties who decides to traverse the eight miles to his home through suburban swimming pools. All of the pools (almost) belong to his country club set friends. In the movie, he has conversations with a lot of them, but the book only includes a few. As he moves through the country side, the season starts to change and so too how he is greeted by these friends. It is clear he has fallen from grace, from affluence, but I don't want to tell you too much because it will detract from your enjoyment or at least appreciation of the story. 

If anything the story spells things out a little more than the movie. In the movie, Lancaster spends the entire 100 minutes in a swim suit. He uses his body to show you the passage of time. Is this a ghost story? Are the pools actually passages of time? You tell me.

This would be on my list of the greatest stories of the 20th century along with "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" and "The Lottery" to name a few. Cheever was a master at tone, description, character. He is knocked about writing only about the upper classes but what do you do when that's the world you know. And he is certainly critical of that group in this story. 

Jerry House

Kevin Tipple

George Kelley 

Monday, Monday

 

Lots of good stuff to watch, read, listen to. Listening to a new podcast called Dead Eyes about an actor who lost his job in Band of Brothers because Tom Hanks claimed he had dead eyes. Of course, he goes on to recount other stories like his. Been watching and listening to a lot of stuff about Sondheim. I have to admit that I don't quite have an ear for him even after a lot of listening this week. 

Love Ann Patchett's essays in this new collection, These Precious Days. 

If you have never seen The Swimmer, based on a Cheever's short story and made in 1968 by Frank Perry, it is one of the most unusual films I have seen. (this was my second viewing) Starts out sad and gets sadder, but Lancaster is brilliant.  

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is also an unusual film. Directors from that era seemed to feel freer to take their time and try out different sorts of shots. Jodie Foster just rips up the screen in her few scenes. A great loss that she no longer acts. And Ellen Burstyn, who got an an Oscar for this, is terrific.

Line of Duty is starting to bother me. You almost need to sit there with a list of police acronyms in your hand to follow the plot. I appreciate verisimilitude but they take it to a fault. Like The Long Call, another police story but the main guy comes from a religious cult background. And is gay. Found the exploration of the man this created interesting. 

First visit with the oncologist today. Wish me luck. I can only take so much more of this. The New Yorker has dubbed 2021 as Purgatory. I haven't managed to make my way out of hell. 

What about you.

Your favorite serial killer. Women crime writers weigh in.

FFB: BLACK IS THE COLOR, John Brunner

From the archives: Randy Johnson

FFB: Black Is The Color – John Brunner

As a young boy discovering a love of reading even as I was learning, John 

Brunner was an early find, third I believe, behind Heinlein and Norton. The early stuff was mostly from the Ace Doubles. Black Is The Color is a little bit different. From 1969, part spy novel, it has a plot line that would fit into things happening today.

Mark Hanwell, a disillusioned young man returns home to London after six months in Spain where he’d met and worked for The Big Famous Writer he only ever refers to as Hairy Harry. It didn’t take long for him to realize his hero had feet of clay, making the bulk of his money selling pornography and weed. In fact, the last four pieces of writing under his name had been written by Mark.

Home, he goes looking for a woman who’d sent him a few letters early on, then stopped. A singer, he traced the bank d she’d been with falling into as different a world as he’d ever run into.

Sadism was part of it, voodoo, a plan to start a race war in England, Mark finds his work and the man she’d taken up with, a South Africaner.

I’d never heard of this book before I came across it. Good stuff

 

Short Story Wednesday

 

TracyK

Richard Robinson

First Wednesday Book Review: Oh, William, Elizabeth Strout

 Elizabeth Strout is probably my favorite writer and Oh, William is a continuation of the story she began in MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON. I love her unadorned, plain-speaking writing style, I like her characters and find them completely credible, I love her affection for even the worst of them. Lucy Barton is introduced as a patient in a hospital after an operation went bad. She spends a month there ruminating on her life and especially on her horrific childhood. Her mother visits her-something unexpected because of the way she treated Lucy as a child. But William calls her in because it is hard for him to visit with a job and two children to care for.

Oh William picks the story up later. Lucy is now a successful novelist with two grown daughters and has just lost her second husband, who she adored. William was her first husband and she is thrown together with him when he finds out he has a stepsister he never knew existed and needs help coping with it. Lucy takes the journey with him despite herself. 

I am now reading the third story about this family (although written before Oh, William) and it is terrific too.Is anything nicer than being in the hands of a writer you love?

For more First Wednesday reviews, visit Barrie Summy. 

A Little Good News

My pathology report finally came back and there is no cancer in any of the lymph nodes they checked and the margins are clear. So hopefully three weeks of radiation once my surgical wounds have healed and then one of the estrogen fighting drugs. I am still hoping to go to California mid-January but it will be tight. I go to the surgeon today to see how healed I am.

Monday, Monday

 Imagine celebrating Thanksgiving in a week where you also saw two productions of your plays and then dying at age 91. (Maybe Jeff was at the same performance). What a blessing. 

Sondheim has always been a bit of a struggle. I think music in general is a weakness for me. So although I can admire his versatility with lyrics/words I still yearn (too much) for a tune to hum. I watched Sweeney Todd for the first time last night and was astonished at how dark it was. How Sweeney never got to redeem himself, right to the end. Is there a darker story? I downloaded a biography of him (by Meryle Secrest) and am determined to get him more. He actually lived in the same town as Phil for a while.

Reading ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE by Elizabeth Strout. Just can't seem to get enough of her. 

Watched KING RICHARD, which I liked more than I expected to. What a strange and interesting man.

Listening to DEAD EYES, a podcast about an actor who was fired from a Tom Hanks miniseries because Hanks claimed he had dead eyes. This is is exploration of that comment. I listen to podcasts a lot. Mostly ones about books, movies, TV. I have given up on all the political ones. 

A nice Thanksgiving, playing games and laughing although I ran out of steam. Apparently that surgery a week ago takes longer to recover from than I expected. 

What about you? Tired of turkey?

Short Story Wednesday

 Jerry House

TracyK

George Kelley 

Richard Robinson

Monday, Monday

Not too much to say here. Watching a show called THE GULF on Acorn and also watched Tic Tic Boom on Netflix. Boy, no one writes many memorable tunes anymore. The music largely seems to advance the plot and it is not something anyone will ever hum as they leave the theater (or sofa).
Still Andrew Garfield was good in the role. Enjoying the TCM podcast on Desi and Lucy. Hoping you have more to say than me.

 My DIL and father.

Give thanks!

 Everything went fine!

Short Story Wedneday

 Kevin Tipple

Richard Robinson 

Todd Mason

Jerry House 

George Kelley 

Monday Monday

I have been in a lockdown in preparation for getting a Covid test today. If I test positive, everything will be delayed and I have a terrible fear of what happened to Jeff Meyerson last year happening to me. I know I don't have Covid, but what if the test gets mixed up. I have to take it at a hospital and I dread walking through one in Michigan right now. What an insane country we live in and I would move to Canada in a minute if they would let me in. 

Anyway, lots of TV since I can only read 2-3 hours a day and walk for one.  I absolutely loved OH WILLIAM by Elizabeth Strout. I am now rereading some of her earlier work that shares characters with this one (MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON). Ready to begin the new Gary Shytengart book next.

Netflix's PASSING has to be the best movie I have seen this year. Hard to believe it is Rebecca Hall's first directing job. I admired the novel (Nella Larson, 1929) and was worried it wouldn't work as a film, but it is entirely faithful to the book, gorgeously filmed, incredibly acted and the music is sublime. Can't recommend it highly enough.

On a much lighter note, I am also enjoying JOE PERA TALKS WITH YOU, (HBO MAX), LOVE LIFE (HBO MAX) and SOUTH SIDE (HBO MAX). Waiting for the last episodes of DALGLIESH and then I may cancel Acorn because I can't find much else I haven't seen on there. Maybe Brit Box is better. Also enjoying DOCTOR BRAIN on Apple but waiting a week for each new episode to drop is trying my memory. 

Megan has been long listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize along with about 35 other writers. 

This will be a difficult week so I probably won't be here again until my procedure is over.  Stay safe and well.

What are you up to?

Friday's Forgotten Books, THE EXPENDABLE MAN, Dorothy B. Hughes

 

(from the archives)

THE EXPENDABLE MAN, Dorothy B. Hughes

A resident at UCLA hospital reluctantly gives a teenager a ride on a deserted road near Phoenix. Right from the beginning, he seems guilty, worried, and we wonder if he perhaps is an unreliable narrator. His actions seems blameless so why the fretting. The girl comes to his hotel room later that night, demanding an abortion, which he refuses to do.

But after 50 or so pages of his fretting and pacing, we find out why he is overly concerned and it changes everything we have thought about him until that point. Irritatingly, many reviews will give this away so if you plan on reading the novel, stay away from other reviews. I think this moment in the novel is far too important to be divulged. 

Written in 1963, THE EXPENDABLE MAN was one of Hughes' last works and it reflects much of what is coming in the later sixties. Although she didn't die for another thirty years, her only other writing seems to be a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner.

I found this to be a moderately exciting read, although I must confess that Hughes' progressive thinking in some areas is undercut by her judgmental attitude in others. Perhaps this reflects the time but she comes down very hard on doctors who provide abortions and girls who need them. It is well written and the characters are deftly drawn. We get a good sense of Phoenix at the time. All in all, a good if not perfect read.

Short Story Wednesday: In the Garden of North American Martyrs, Tobias Wolff " An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke" and "Next Door"

Some years ago, I went to an event where both Wolff's brothers, sitting beside one another in front of a gorgeous fire place, dressed casually, discussed their lives and works. When they were children their parents divorced and Tobias went with his mother, Geoffrey with his father. Both have written about their childhood and a very strange one it was. (Duke of Deception and This Boy's Life) These are very fine memoirs and This Boy's Life was made into a film with a young Leonardo DiCaprio.

Wolff's short stories always feel like this very event surely happened much as it is written. There is a looseness about them, a lack of a strong central theme, that gives me this idea. In "Next Door" a couple listen to the the horrible fight going on next door. The wife asks if she can sleep with her husband in his single bed that night. (We don't know why they are sleeping apart) but when her husband tries to initiate sex she rejects it. This very short story ends with him thinking how he would rewrite a movie he'd been watching: El Dorado. The contrast between the noisy violence next door and the passionless stiffness of the couple is stark. You can't help but wonder if what he would really like to rewrite is his life.

"An Episode" concerns a professor at an MLA conference.  He meets a woman who is helping with the catering and has a one-night stand. He believes he's gotten away with this but a colleague knows and his wife smells the woman's perfume on his shirt. There are a lot of other strands here: the backbiting of professors at a conference, the annoying colleague he gives a ride to, cancer, the enjoyment of poetry that is less than scholarly, how hypocritical so many of us are. And it surely paints a harsh picture of those in the academy. 

Jerry House

Kevin Tipple 

George Kelley 

Richard Robinson

Monday, Monday

Saw two movies at the theater last week. Last Night at Soho was awfully dark for me and French Dispatch too light. I must have an very small sweet spot.  I have never been that much of a Wes Anderson fan although I have seen most of his movies. I guess my favorite is Moonrise Kingdom.

I watched The Electric Life of Louis Bain on TV, which was oddest movie of all. Louis Bain was the world's most popular artist of cats. Benedict Cumberbatch was excellent in the role but it was sooooooooo weird.  Filmed in a strange way and about a family of eccentric people. 

I signed on for Acorn to get the new Dalgliesh series which seems good based on the first two episodes. 

I talked to a friend today in the hospital with a stroke but she also caught Covid despite being vaccinated. The nurses in her section were told to go into patient rooms as little as possible so she had horrible care. I am so sad that the people not getting shots have brought this sort of treatment about. I wonder if they know or care what they have wrought.  

Have no attention for reading novels right now. Didn't even finish the Krueger one which seemed like it was dragging out the plot for far too long. First time I noticed that with him so it was probably me. I have the new Jonathan Frantzen here so maybe I will try that. 

How about you?

Friday's Forgotten Books

 (From the archives)

Mack Lundy grew up in an Air force family whose travels included a posting to Pretoria, South Africa (1952-56) where he acquired an English accent, a fondness for ginger beer, and exposure to his first mysteries, Enid Blyton's Famous Five series. Alas, he lost the accent but still likes ginger beer and mysteries. He is a retired systems librarian at the Swem Library of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His non-work interest is the study of crime fiction, particularly noir and hard-boiled.

HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL. Robert A. Heinlein, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958.
TUNNEL IN THE SKY. Robert A. Heinlein, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955.

For my forgotten books I want to go back to the time when my reading habits had started to firm up. Along with reading everything in the school library by John Steinbeck, science fiction was my preferred genre. The 1960s were a remarkable time for science. The launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 started the Space Race which gave us cosmonauts and astronauts in space by 1961. It is little wonder that a teenager would find himself obsessed with hard science fiction and off-world travel. I loved science fiction and adventure stories and one author really stood out, Robert A. Heinlein. Sure I read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke but it was Heinlein's juvenile science fiction that could combine pulse pounding excitement with hard science.Several decades ago I acquired seven of Heinlein's juvenile science fiction novels that were being discarded from a school library. They remained boxed while I moved from job to job. When I got them out of the attic for this post, I found that two of the titles I most fondly remembered were there, Have Space Suit - Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky. Being a librarian I wanted to see if there was some way to measure if these qualified as forgotten books. We have a very active public library in Williamsburg, VA and they were able to tell me that Have Space Suit - Will Travel has circulated 72 times since 1985. That doesn't make it entirely forgotten but it is by no means a Harry Potter or Twilight. Tunnel in the Sky, on the other hand, has been checked out once, making it a truly forgotten book.Have Space Suit- Will Travel (anyone else remember Paladin) is the story of teenager Kip Russell who who wins a functional space suit as a consolation prize in a soap company jingle contest. Making the best of his disappointment at not wining the grand prize of a trip to the moon, Kip restores the suit to space worthiness. He goes out for a walk in the suit one night, answers a distress call on his suit radio, and quickly finds himself a captive of aliens who view humans as a food source along with an eleven year old human girl genius named Peewee and an intergalactic cop that Kip and Peewee call the Mother Thing. The story has an amazing escape attempt on the moon, heroic acts of self-sacrifice on Pluto, and, along the way, Kip and Peewee save the earth from destruction. Heady stuff, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. One of the cool things about this book is that Heinlein makes science a part of the story in a non-pedantic way. I would have thought that staying warm would be a problem on the moon but no, I learned, it's how to get rid of excess heat.Tunnel in the Sky has another teenage boy who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. In Rod Walker's world, an interstellar teleporter is used to establish colonies to ease earth's over crowding. The colonies have to be self-supporting and the colonists move through the teleporter in a high-tech - but still pulled by horse or mule - version of the old west Conestoga wagon. Rod wants to lead these expeditions but that requires completion of a solo survival exercise as part of a class in advanced survival. Along with students from various high schools which gives the plot the necessary mix of ages and abilities, Rod is dumped on an unknown planet with only the gear he can carry. Something goes wrong and the students find themselves stranded with no way of knowing when, or if, they will be rescued. The students struggle to form a community in which Rod becomes a leader.Where Have Suit - Will Travel features hard science, Tunnel in the Sky deals more with the societal demands associated with creating a community and the politics of leadership. More so than Have Space Suit - Will Travel, for me, Tunnel in the Sky is in the "how would I act in that situation, would I survive" school of adventure fiction. It made me think and I remember coming away from the book wishing that I could carry a knife.With the benefit of hindsight I can now see that Heinlein, in his juvenile science fiction, was developing the character types and philosophies that would mark his adult works. I was also struck by how readable these books remain. They are dated in many ways; slide rules are high tech. and the guys wear crew cuts. But despite the bits of patronizing sexism (mild for the day), Heinlein provided strong, independent female characters. At the core these are still solid, relevant, stories that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to a young person.
 

Short Story Wednesday

I started to review this story of Megan's myself and then decided to let Kristopher's review stand in for mine. The story is very strong on atmosphere. You are filled with dread reading it.

The Little Men – A BOLO Books Short Story Review

by Kristopher | Sep 10, 2015 | Review

Vintage Hollywood and Megan Abbott is like Chocolate with Strawberries – a perfect pairing. Megan has already shown readers that she can write damn fine novels (such as Dare Me, The Fever, and Bury Me Deep) and she has written one of my favorite overlooked short stories, “My Heart is Either Broken.” Now with “The Little Men,” she has contributed to The Mysterious Bookshop’s great series of Bibliomysteries.

“The Little Men” is set in 1950’s Hollywood. It is the story of Penny Smith, a failed actress who is now making a living by doing makeup on the movie lots of yesteryear. Struggling to make ends meet, when Penny finds an affordable bungalow for rent in Canyon Arms, she thinks her prayers have been answered.

Sure, the landlady – Mrs. Stahl – is a bit odd and maybe more that a bit nosy, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’s only when Penny makes friends with the eccentric gay couple next door in Bungalow Number Five that she starts to learn more about the history of her new abode.

The Little Men by Megan Abbott

It seems that Lawrence, one of the previous tenets committed suicide in her cherished bungalow. Larry was a bookseller who shared his love of literature with Mrs. Stahl. Is it possible there was more to that relationship? An inscription in one of Mrs. Stahl’s treasured books might just hold the answer.

All of this becomes more complicated when Penny finds out that Larry was seeing the exact same visions of tiny little men scurrying across the bungalow floor in the wee hours of the night that she has started to see since moving into Bungalow Number Four. Is Penny following Larry’s path to madness?

Megan Abbott keeps the suspense high in this short story. Readers will run through the gamut of possibilities before what is really happening – and what really happened – is finally revealed. You can always count of Megan Abbott to tell a satisfying story featuring strong female characters and “The Little Men” is just further proof. This one is a fine new addition to the Bibliomysteries line of books.

 

More about Otto Penzler's bibliomysteries   Briefly, every Christmas he publishes one in a small book form.

 THE LITTLE MEN won the Anthony Award for Best Short Story in 2016.   

Todd Mason

Kevin Tipple

TracyK 

Richard Robinson

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

Monday, Monday

 

There is no way Paul Newman had the build this poster represents. Men just didn't work on their bodies that way in 1958. But I enjoyed this movie in spite of that. And he still is about the best looking man I have ever seen. Although Orson Welles, in some very strange makeup stole the show. 

(THE BIG CHILL) This is a movie I rewatch often because the music is so wonderful and also the cast. Jeff Goldblum always is the coolest guy in the room, isn't he?

Also went to see DUNE, which I liked but didn't love. Not my favorite genre but they did a good job with it.

Watching THE ALIENIST, which I didn't catch a few years ago. 

Reading LIGHTNING STRIKES by W.KK., which is terrific so far. Why am I drawn to stories about boys of the last century growing up in small towns with Indians among them? If I had a fault to notice, it is that WKK's kids are just too darn polite. I was a kid then and only Eddie Haskell was that polite to adults. Other than that, I love it.

Got to have a few meals out with friends and went to breakfast with my family so despite my health issues it was a good week. 

What about you?