Some of the areas that need work

 

The only difficult one is the large circle one, second on here. It has a lot of perennials and a lot of weeds. 

I got an app for my phone called Picture This so I wouldn't pull out flowers thinking they are weeds.

Phil chose this house because he thought he could do a lot of great gardening. Now I feel obliged to try and keep it up.

Still Here

I had a very nice two week trip to VA, MD, DC and DE. Great weather. Mostly we walked in gardens because the museums were just opening. My brother and his family are moving to FL so it may be the last time I go to VA at least.  Lewes is a very nice town on the ocean although it was too cold to really do more than walk on the beach. Great meals though. Lots of fish, of course.

Now I am knee-deep in gardening and it really is too much for me. There are beds everywhere that need lots of weeding and planting. I ordered 8 bags of mulch not realizing how heavy they are. Oh, well, there's always next year. 

Reading KLARA AND THE SUN, which I am not enjoying much sadly. The flat writing style he uses for his AI characters seems to be catching because the human characters use it too. 

I did enjoy Megan's book, THE TURNOUT, which is getting great prepublication reviews. It comes out in August.She will be doing a virtual tour that I will post on here before it happens. Also reading THE OVERSTORY for my book group.

Still enjoying FOR ALL MANKIND and just started THE FRENCH VILLAGE. IN TREATMENT looks promising. Hpefully MARE ended well last night. Also found a show called LOUDERMILK with Ron Livingstone on Prime, which is pretty good. 

I am going to get hearing aids. Anyone have any recommendations for me?

And what about you?
 

 

Short Story Wednesday, "The Best of Everything," Richard Yates

 

Richard Yates wrote two of my favorite novels, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and THE EASTER PARADE, but he also wrote this fabulous collection of ten short stories (among others). Written in the fifties "The Best of Everything" almost seems like a story written earlier. Were people in their twenties this naive? This innocent? I have to assume some were.

It is the story of a couple on the day before their marriage is to take place in Atlantic City. The point of view switches between the two of them and you can't help but notice how drastically different they are from each other once you are in their heads. You also realize they don't know each other at all and that their marriage will probably fail quickly. 

The woman is a typical middle class young woman working as a secretary. She speaks well and is respected in her office. The man is a step or two down the socioeconomic ladder and has a poor grasp of English, which the woman's roommate makes her constantly aware of, calling he and his friends, "Ratty little clerks." 

But for whatever reason, Grace goes forward with the marriage plans although we sense her worry. Her roommate, feeling badly about the things she has said about Eddie, leaves her alone the night before the wedding and Grace plans an early consummation, feeling this will set things right.

But Eddie has been the man of the hour with his friends at a bachelor party and he is stunned by their good will. You get the feeling he has never been the center of attention before this night. He hurries to Grace's apartment to tell her he is going back to the party and her attempt to seduce him goes to naught.

We understand now that Eddie will always choose his friends over his wife and that will destroy their marriage quickly. She goes so far to put his hand on her naked breast. Nothing.

There is a lot of discussion online about this story. One teacher said it was the cause of a female student in his class dumping her boyfriend. Yates' real gift here is capturing the mind and language of both characters so clearly and with sympathy. Eddie is not a bad man and Grace is not a snob, but they certainly don't belong together. They seem to have reached an age when they believe it is time to marry no matter to who.

Here is a nice piece by Stewart O'Nan pondering the fate of the writing of Richard Yates. He had an unhappy life and an undeserved disappearance from the shelves. His resurgence in the early nineties quickly died out. A real shame.

I will be back in three weeks with more short story reviews but don't let that stop you. 

Kevin Tipple

Jerry House 

TracyK

George Kelley  

Matt Paust

Still Here

 Megan has been here for a few days and what a gift that is after 16 months. We saw a fairly bad movie (NOBODY), went out to lunch, went out to dinner, had dinner at Josh's house, and had a pedicure, my first ever. Also watched 1934's DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY with Frederic March, what a strange film.

Crazy about the Apple TV series FOR ALL MANKIND. Odd to feel affection for an alternative history of the space program but it is so interesting to envision the changes that would happen if the Russians had landed on the moon first. 

 Back into the horror show of THE HANDMAID'S TALE. My interest is waning.

Been listening to a lot of the music (soundtracks) of Nicholas Britell (Succession, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) 

I will be a bit sparse here for the next two weeks. 

What's happening with you?

FFB-SQUEEZE PLAY, Paul Benjamin (Paul Auster)

(From the archives 2009)

Kent Morgan writes a sports column for a paper in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but spends most of his time puzzling over what to do with all the books piled on his furniture and floor and stored in his garage. More bookcases are not the answer as he has no room for them.

Squeeze Play - Paul Benjamin - Avon 1984

Five years ago third baseman George Chapman had an Alex Rodriguez-type season as the New York Americans won the World Series. Unlike Rodriguez, he seemed to be the perfect hero at a time New York City was dealing with strikes and political scandals. The following February his career came to an end when he lost his left leg following a car accident in upstate New York. He disappeared from sight for awhile, but then returned to the limelight as an advocate for the handicapped. Now a possible candidate for a US senate seat, Chapman contacts PI Max Klein as he has received a letter threatening blackmail and possible death. The pair played college baseball against each other and after graduation from Columbia, Klein worked as a lawyer in the D.A.'s office before switching to his career as a gumshoe. Klein's law school friend Chip Contini, the son of east coast mob head Victor Contini, recommended Klein to Chapman. Chapman claims he has no idea what he has done that could lead to blackmail or why anyone would want to kill him. Squeeze Play turns out to be a pretty routine PI novel with Klein getting beat up several times by thugs who he believes work for the older Contini. Chapman is found dead early in the book and soon his attractive widow, who had a rocky relationship with her husband, is making a play for Klein.

The author actually is Paul Benjamin Auster, who went on to write several novels loved by the critics including the New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), The Locked Room (1987), which have been described as "surreal variations of the urban detective story." Auster supposedly wrote this book while living in France in the 1970s during a period that he needed money. While the Avon edition often is listed as a paperback original and offered at high prices by book dealers, an earlier edition was published in 1982. In his memoir, Hand to Mouth; a Chronicle of Early Failure (1997), Auster does not identify the publisher and writes, "production of my novel dragged on for two years. By the time it was printed, he had lost his distributor, had no money left, and to all intents and purposes was dead as a publisher. A few copies made it into a few New York bookstores, hand-delivered by the publisher himself, but the rest of the edition remained in cardboard boxes, gathering dust on the floor of a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn. For all I know, the books are still there."

Andy McCue, the current president of the Society for American Baseball Research and author of Baseball by the Books: a History and Complete Bibliography of Baseball Fiction (1991), has added to the story. "I have never seen a hardbound copy of Squeeze Play, but do have a 1982 paperback. This could explain the 1982 copyright on the 1984 Avon reprint. The trade-sized paperback has a highly garish pinky/purple cover, with a series of shapes breaking up the cover into several sections, most of them filled with drawings. The drawings are fairly amateurish, as are the production values of the book as a whole. The publisher is listed as Alpha/Omega Book Publishers, Inc. of New York."

An interesting history to a book that likely is not on the radar of anyone other than Auster completists and baseball fiction collectors.

 

Short Story Wednesday: THE DAEMON LOVER, Shirley Jackson

 

This story could be read as a realistic tale of a woman who is jilted on her wedding day. But it is also easy to see it as eerie and unsettling. The story begins with a young woman (age 34) trying to decide what to wear for her wedding that day. Her fiance has come into her life recently and the proposal seems to be unexpected. When the time he was supposed to appear comes and goes, she sets out to find out what befell him. She visits the apartment he claims to live in, the florist where he might have bought flowers, the shoe shine man who might have polished his shoes. Eventually she works her way to a building where someone reported seeing him. On the top floor are two doors. One gives way to a dilapidated room. but she can hear laughter behind the other door. She knocks but no one answers. She returns on occasion to this place but he is never there. 

Was he ever there? Although she claims to be 34, you can easily see her as much older given the way she is treated. I really expected to find out this had all happened fifty years earlier and she was locked into a Groundhog Day scenario. 

Her lover's name is Jamie Harris. Maybe Jackson is establishing a link to this.

"The Daemon Lover", also known as "James Harris", "James Herries", or "The House Carpenter" (Roud 14, Child 243) is a popular Scottish ballad^[1] dating to around 1685.^[2] Roud records the title as A warning for married women and identifies the woman in the song as "Mrs. Jane Reynolds (a west-country-Woman) born near Plimouth who having plighted her troth to a Seaman, was afterwards married to a Carpenter, and at last carried away by a Spirit."^[3]

^{As always the excellent writing carries this story.}  

 

^{Jerry House} 

^{George Kelley} 

^{Richard Robinson} 

^{Matt Paust} 

Still Here

 

Lots of rain in Michigan. Hard to get the new plants into the ground. And I am horrible at it because I don't really have the upper arm strength to dig with a proper shovel.  So I must not buy any more plants. A trip to the nursery is great though and you must get something new.

Reading a really fun book, A MAN NAMED DOLL (Ames). I am sure you would all like it too. Also reading the Philip Roth bio and watched a doc about him on TV. He was probably the writer I read most in my life so even the his biographer is a horrible person, I will read it. Roth was probably a bit of a jerk too, but his work was not.  Also reading HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE, David Thomson.

Watching the twenty seasons of SILENT WITNESS, which is good although too many of the cases concern accidents (murders) with multiple victims and it is hard to keep track of them all. It is a well-done show though (Prime). Also watching MARE OF EASTTOWN and ATLANTIC CROSSING. I seem to watch more documentaries than anything else right now. 

Rewatched RACHEL GETTING MARRIED after a podcast discussed it. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks from my library and podcasts. When you live alone, I think, you need to have something on: tv, radio or audiobooks. 

What about you?

FFB RIDERS ON THE STORM, Ed Gorman

Here is Ron Scheer reviewing Ed Gorman in 2014. R.I.P. buddies.  

Ed Gorman, Riders on the Storm

Ed Gorman’s new Sam McCain mystery is set in 1971 and reflects some of the civil turbulence of those Vietnam years as they wash over a small Iowa town. 

Plot. A hawkish Senator is trying to ride a waning tide of patriotic enthusiasm to keep himself in office. But his handpicked candidate for a Congressional seat gets murdered after an altercation with a fellow veteran who has made public his opposition to the war.

That John Kerry-sympathizing vet is quickly suspected of the crime by the new sheriff, and the man’s best friend, McCain, has an uphill battle finding evidence of his innocence.  

Time and tide. Gorman remembers the early 70s well (Janis Joplin is heard on the radio at one point singing “Me and Bobby McGee”). The novel is aptly named for the mournful Doors song, “Riders On the Storm,” which recalls the darkly violent and divided mood of a time marked by the growing national ambivalence about Vietnam. He is also a sharp observer of small-town politics and social distinctions.

The portrayal of women in the novel does much to fix its particular point in social history. Whether wives, lovers, or others, they are mostly untouched by the feminist creeds that came to dominate public discourse about gender roles in the years that followed. Gorman shows them as attractive and sexy, reliant on the men in their lives, homemakers and loving mothers of small children.

Ed Gorman

Two, however, emerge as professional women, one of them McCain’s own girl Friday, bracingly independent and unapologetically resourceful. Another seems able to blend marriage and career, though we don’t learn quite everything a candid review would reveal about her until well after she gets involved in McCain’s attempts to rescue his falsely accused friend.

While Gorman does not necessarily endorse it, there is much of the 1970s indulgence in extramarital sex, booze, and other pastimes that had a generation smugly confident in themselves because they were under 30. But you can feel the earth shifting under McCain’s feet as the 1960s recede into the hazy distance behind him.

Wrapping up. This is an enjoyable novel that has as much fun capturing the time and place of its setting as puzzling over the clues pointing to the solution of the mystery it poses. Whether westerns or crime fiction, you know you’re in good hands with Ed Gorman. I recommend this one.

Riders on the Storm is currently available in print and ebook formats at amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Short Story Wednesday: "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" John Cheever

This is one of John Cheever's most well-known short stories and you can find it online in the New Yorker archives. There a ton of discussion about it as well as Ph.D dissertations that consider it. It offers a critique of the new suburbia that was going on at the time. 

It begins when a young man, working his way up in the plastic industry, is sent to fire a man well above him in the pecking order. What he sees at the man's apartment embarrasses the man who manages to pull himself together and then fires Johnny as a witness to his disgrace. Johnny is very given to feeling sorry for himself, is estranged from his mother, and somewhat at odds with most everyone. Now struggling to keep up his life-style, he robs his next door neighbor of his wallet. He does this at night while they are sleeping in the same room as the wallet.  

Johnny thinks a lot about money, about his privileged childhood, about the unfairness of what's happened to him. When his birthday comes and his children give  him a ladder, he immediately ties it into his being a second-story man although of course, the kids don't know about that. His poor behavior sparks a fight with his wife. The story ends with his returning the money and almost getting caught by a police car. 

Now there is a lot more to it than this but so much of it is interior thoughts it is hard to sum up. Some of it is amusing and some of it is pathetic. It is both a defense and a critique of the banlieue. Cheever is a master of the literary short story.

"Shady Hill, as I say a banlieue, and open to criticism by city planners, adventurers and lyric poets, but if you work in the city and have children to raise, I can't think of a better place."

Banlieue is the French word for suburb. 

Kevin Tipple

Jerry House   

TracyK 

George Kelley

Richard Robinson 

Matt Paust 

Still Here

 

 

I saw JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH and SOUL to finish off my Oscar viewings. I liked JUDAS more than I expected because the two lead performances were so strong. And I liked SOUL about as much as I expected given my reaction to Pixar's need to turn everything (IN AND OUT and UP) into a philosophy classroom. But the music and animation were great.

I have had good luck with ordering things online over the last year, but this week when I strayed from Amazon, Costco let me down by delivering the wrong thing and making me go to the store to return it. Which means I have to get a friend to drive me there, wait while I stand in the return line, drive me home. Costco got my last online order. 

Read Sigrid Nunez book that I liked but not as much as THE FRIEND.

MARE OF EASTTOWN looks promising. 

I tried to watch CONDOR and saw two episodes but then PRIME told me I had to subscribe to EPIX to get the rest. Well, guess what. I get EPIX with my cable package but episodes 3-5 are no longer there. 

 

 

 

So I guess that's the end of CONDOR. 

Rewatched CROUPIER and SHOOT THE MOON this week. Both were great, but Bob Seger's STILL THE SAME has been in my head since I watched STM. 

Weather has been mostly cold and rainy. Expecting a break this week. Oh, the weeds, the weeds.

What about you?

 

FFB-Joe Bonney Series by Jack Livingstone

 

Jack Livingstone wrote four (to my knowledge) books about his deaf detective, Joe Binney, which I quite enjoyed in the 1980s. The series was brought to mind after seeing THE SOUND OF METAL, about a musician going deaf. A deaf musician is certainly a more serious handicap than in a detective but Joe had to work around his deafness too. He was not born deaf but acquired it in the Korean War. Anyone else read him?

1982: A Piece of the Silence

1984-Die Again, Macready

1986-The Nightmare File

1987 Hellbent for Homicide (also known ad Hellbent for Election)

Two Years Ago Tomorrow

 

April 23, 2019

Two years gone

and you missed the world mutate

how strange to imagine you

out on the road among the masked

trying to parse

what can't be understood

weaving through contesting slogans

inked during curfews

washed out by moonlight

seeing men scale hallowed edifices

unchecked and merciless

defiling doctrines once sacred

Two years and the world you knew

is more gone than you.

 

A William Maxwell short story

 https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Maxwell_Actual_Thing.pdf

Short Story Wednesday: "My Father's Friends" from ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS, William Maxwell

William Maxwell wrote one of my favorite novels, TIME WILL DARKEN IT, but despite having his collected stories I have read none till now. He has divided the book into traditional short stories and something he calls improvisations. This is what he says about the improvisations. "I wrote them to please my wife. When we were first married, I would tell her a story in the dark. I had no idea where they came from. Sometimes I fell asleep and she would shake me and say, "What happened next?" I would struggle through the layers of oblivion and tell her." 

That is perhaps my favorite story of all. How nice to make up stories for your wife.

"My Father's Friends" is about a visit made by a man after his father's death to two friends who were not well enough to attend the funeral . The first friend was man his father fished with and our protagonist finds much in common with this friend and they become friends. The second man golfed with his father and he is a harder man to like. He is critical of the man's now dead father, claiming he liked women too much. The story ends with an aunt telling our protagonist that as the second friend's wife lay dying she told him he was the dearest husband any wife ever had. So this statement helps the man to find goodness in the friend. The story is very well written but more a memory perhaps than a story. I will have to read more of them. 

Kevin Tipple

Jerry House 

TracyK 

Richard Robinson 

George Kelley 

Matt Paust 

Todd Mason

Still Here

In Michigan the virus is bad enough now that two-year olds are supposed to wear masks. I think that this is going to put them in a therapist chair twenty five years from now, but what can we do? If only their fathers would get their shots or wear their masks. Only 40% of men are getting shots compared to 60% of women. Now part of this is because the early shots went to school teachers and health care workers who are mostly women. But still. Then I read an article in SLATE that basically said wearing a mask outside (unless the street is very crowded) in  pretty unnecessary. Who knows and it seems like the medical profession has no idea either. 

Watching THE ACCIDENT on Hulu, which is pretty scary. Also scary is the Swedish doc series on HBO, PRAY, OBEY, KILL. Until COVID I never knew how many cults there were in the world. Why are so many documentarians attracted to cults?

And the scariest of all was QUO VADIS, AIDA on Hulu, a nominee for best foreign film. It's about the slaughter by the Bosnian Serbs of the people of Srebreneca in 1995. Mankind is just hard to like most of the time. 

Still really enjoying the Mike Nichols biography. I have two books to pick up at the library because the six hundred unread books on my shelves never seem to get read. It's sort of like when I was a teenager and always liked the boy I wasn't dating. What does get read is my bookclub books though. We discuss BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC, Tuesday night. Next comes THE OVERSTORY.

Got to see Megan interview Willie Vlautin this week. Most of these interviews end up on you tube a few days later so if you are interesting in any author on a virtual book tour you can catch him/her that way. I think these interviews work very well, better than seeing the author just talk about their book at a bookstore. Megan, a big Vlautin fan, knew the book so well, it was like a college class. A lot of writers are not particularly good at just giving a book talk but by having another author interview them and discuss the book, it really becomes vivid. 

Now play readings I have been watching are less successful in many cases. Most plays need movement and some costume changes and scenery to succeed. Also some actors are much better than others at not seeming to read the script. 

Enough about me, what about you?

FFB: THE BOOK THIEF, Markus Zusak

Sorry this one is up a day early.

THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak was chosen by my book group as their April selection. (In 2009)
 

When I learned it was a YA book, I groaned.
When I learned it was about the Second World War in Germany, I groaned again.
Then I found out it was about a ten-year old girl orphaned and sent to live with a foster family. Jeez, I thought. Can't we ever read a happy book?

THE BOOK THIEF was not a happy book. But it was a highly original book-much more so than most adult novels I read. I don't even understand why someone classified it as YA. Is every book with a YA hero classified as YA? But this is a book teachers might choose for teens. I think my grandson read it in seventh grade.

The narrator in THE BOOK THIEF is Death and he tells the story from the standpoint of someone overwhelmed with his mission during the war. Death has his hands full.

But THE BOOK THIEF is even more the story of a young girl who loses her family and is sent to live with a foster family in a small German town. She can't read at first but values books greatly and collects them in whatever way she can. Her foster father reads to her every night from the improbable books she finds or steals. The family is kind, both to her and to a Jewish man fleeing the Nazis who is hiding in their basement.

This book certainly humanizes the German people. We watch them starve, freeze and die. Certainly its portrait of Nazis is acute. But with THE READER and this book, the trend is now to understand the Germans were victims of Hitler and fascism too. Maybe it is time to think about this.

It's really hard to do that though, knowing the smell of gassed bodies was mere miles away. Still, THE BOOK THIEF is a book worth reading.

Jean Thompson's "The Widower" from her collection Who Do You Love?

This was s National Book Award Finalist in 1999. It's not hard to understand why. Thompson writes gorgeous short stories. She has several other collections as well as a few novels.

A young couple is looking for their first house. A contender, at their price  point, is the home of a widower. Unlike most homeowners, he hangs around as they look through the house, both pointing out its good features but calling attention to others. A doctor, he has recently lost his wife. Over the course of the story, he will give husband man three stories of how his wife died. They vary especially in his feelings toward the event. Was it a long happy marriage or was he glad to be rid of her? 

A heart attack drops the price of the house and the couple buy it. The widower still stops by to see what improvements they are making. The wife is tolerant of this but the husband finds it irking--perhaps because it makes him doubt their ability to have a long and happy marriage. Great story. Great writer.

Kevin Tipple

Jerry House 

Richard Robinson 

George Kelley 

Todd Mason 

Matt Paust

Willie Vlautin's Virtual Book Tour

 

Willie Vlautin's virtual book tour for The Night Always Comes lands at City Lights Bookstore in S.F. tomorrow and Megan will be interviewing him. Here is the link. It is free but you have to register. http://www.citylights.com/info/?fa=event&event_id=3762

You can also catch him at other book stores.  https://www.willyvlautin.com/post/virtual-tour-dates-the-night-always-comes

Once registered you will get information on how to link up. These links usually work well. 

I read the book a few months ago and enjoyed it as I have all of his books. One of the few writers who writes about everyday people. 

Still Here

 Reading LUSTER, which has to have some of the best reviews of a debut novel I have ever seen. It is the story of a young Black woman who gets drawn into a white family who've adopted a Black child. The writing is extremely sharp, you feel like every word has been honed--perhaps too much at times. But I certainly am in awe of such a prodigy. On her cover picture, she looks about 25. It is not my kind of book exactly. Do you feel like you have a particular kind of book that is likely to speak to you? Maybe she is just too young but Rebecca was very young and that books speaks to me. Maybe she is too much of this time and place. I am not sure but although I certainly admire Leilani's use of the language and her complex thoughts, it is not a book that draws me in. 

Enjoying Happy Hour, a five-hour Japanese movie on Kanopy. They have broken it into three parts and it concerns four 37 year old women in Japan in 2015.I get Kanopy through my library as well as Hoopla.

Finish Shtisel, which I really enjoyed and they were kind enough to provide some happy endings. Also watched This is a Robbery, a 4-part doc on Netflix about the robbery of the Isabel Gardner Museum in the nineties. Somewhat overly long. Three parts probably would have been better. Also the magnificent Ken Burns doc on Ernest Hemingway.

Also plugging away at the Mike Nichols bio, which is very well done. 

We celebrated Josh's birthday this weekend. Nice to be together without masks since we all have had our shots. Interesting learning how gym was conducted in Kevin's virtual school. Virtual gym turns out to be his Mom filming him doing various things like sit-ups and playing catch. How much this generation is losing with this pandemic going on and on. Half of Michigan has just given up on any sort of social distancing. And you can guess who they voted for. 

How about you?