tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71199903654790097642024-03-18T20:02:59.693-05:00Do Some DamageA group blog for crime fiction and other genre writers, providing a platform for fresh and diverse voices for over a decade.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4270125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-35098529676366445402024-03-16T03:00:00.002-05:002024-03-16T03:00:00.144-05:00Reacher Season 2 Reaches Back into Reacher’s Past<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiAAfOuwcS6BL0WdMgBzKFE1EMXPlo6KdRa4wIf7qbQRtHudgS_AE_LTIMcODxAJf-N-8OiUvoihsls3klvuOMYAdfR3h_dge6_Qoez2Zid8x7Wu2kAfpqgb2vjfFn2O40Szm62_TECZIRMt6BZFWyFGy1OOvaUg5ylzzbjt7rpnPPmYVKaIgi38r2K8I/s608/reacher%202.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="608" data-original-width="404" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiAAfOuwcS6BL0WdMgBzKFE1EMXPlo6KdRa4wIf7qbQRtHudgS_AE_LTIMcODxAJf-N-8OiUvoihsls3klvuOMYAdfR3h_dge6_Qoez2Zid8x7Wu2kAfpqgb2vjfFn2O40Szm62_TECZIRMt6BZFWyFGy1OOvaUg5ylzzbjt7rpnPPmYVKaIgi38r2K8I/w133-h200/reacher%202.jpeg" width="133" /></a></div>By<p></p><p>Scott D. Parker</p><p>I’ve now watched the second season of Amazon’s “Reacher” and not only am I caught up, I’m all in.</p><p>Let’s be fair: I was all in back in the first fifteen minutes of the pilot episode, when Reacher did the Sherlock Holmes thing to the local police detective. Alan Ritchson’s portrayal of Reacher is fantastic. He has the brawn to take on anyone and be scared of no one. He has the brain to outthink any opponent, usually before they even realize it. But it’s Ritchson’s gentle demeanor that is probably my favorite part of the character on screen.</p><p>Season 1 is Reacher the Wanderer, the guy who literally walks the earth (a modern day version of David Carradine’s “Kung Fu”?). In this season, we get strangers who question Reacher’s lifestyle choice. In Season 2, we get Reacher’s backstory in the form of his old army unit.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Getting Most of the Band Back Together</h3><p>The main plot of Season 2–based on the novel Bad Luck and Trouble—involves a mysterious group taking out the members of Reacher’s old army unit, the 110th Special Investigations Unit. Reacher’s ally from Season 1, Neagley, sends Reacher an SOS (in the form of a particular dollar amount on an ATM receipt). Fearing that the entire 110th is on someone’s hit list, they join forces to figure out who’s behind it all.</p><p>As a Reacher newbie, I really enjoy this season specifically because we get backstory. Interspersed with the main plot, we get flashbacks to when Reacher commanded the military police unit. We get to see the big man actually be part of a team of people he can rely on to have his back just as he has theirs.</p><p>Particularly funny are all the comments his former soldiers give him in the present. Other than Neagley, we are introduced to David O’Donnell who is now a lawyer with a family and Karla Dixon, a forensic accountant and one who pined for Reacher back in the day. I particularly liked O’Donnell because he’s a smaller guy, married (in direct opposition to his earlier life), and who is perfectly willing to stick his neck out for the team, but knows he cannot withstand all the punishment that Reacher can…but still does it.</p><p>O’Donnell and Dixon both haven’t seen Reacher in years and they pepper him with questions about his current life, why, and what his future plans are. His calm replies typically broach no follow-up and they just find it odd. As most of us do, to be honest. </p><p>Seeing these four operate together is fantastic. They’ve each acquired new skills since leaving the army, but they remain steadfastly loyal to each other. That kind of camaraderie is something we all would like in our lives. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Taking No Prisoners</h3><p>As you can imagine, as Reacher and his team learn more and get closer to the bad guys—lead by Robert Patrick, a guy who can do smarmy with ease—there are numerous set pieces where the bad guys send out ruffians to take out Reacher and his friends. Love every one of them! It’s great to see the different fighting styles of the four former army cops as they dispatch the bad guy, but not always without injuries. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">A New Ally</h3><p>Season 2 also features an NYC detective, Gaitano Russo, who initially thinks Reacher and his pals are up to no good but, ultimately, comes around to helping them. Russo is played by Dominick Lombardozzi, an actor I know from “The Wire.” The way Lombardozzi reveals what kind of cop he is and why is wonderful and is a great part of this season.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">What’s Next?</h3><p>I know that Reacher Season 3 has been greenlit so when it debuts, I’ll be there on Day One. Both seasons of Reacher are great and I recommend them.</p><p>In the meantime, however, I’ll be doing two things. One, I’ll revisit the two Tom Cruise movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know they’re not like the books, but I’ve already seen them and enjoyed both. Now I just want to rewatch in light of Ritchson’s portrayal of the character that’s more in line with the books.</p><p>And the second thing I plan on doing is the thing Lee Child wished I did twenty-eight books ago: read a Reacher novel or two. Anyone got a Top 5 they’d like to share?</p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-59622343253541565312024-03-14T08:29:00.011-05:002024-03-14T09:45:47.490-05:00Tell the best story you can: An interview with Bobby Mathews<div style="text-align: left;"><span>By</span><i> <a href="https://steveweddle.substack.com/about" target="_blank">Steve Weddle</a></i></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://bamawriter.com/" target="_blank">Bobby Mathews</a> is a University of Alabama fan, but don't hold that against him.</div><div><br /></div><div>He won the Derringer Award for Best Long Story with "Negative Tilt," the title track for his new collection. He won awards with the Alabama Media Professionals for his novel, <i>Living the Gimmick</i>, and for his short story, "The Ghost of Buxahatchee Creek."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And, about Mathews's 2023 novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Magic-City-Blues-Bobby-Mathews-ebook/dp/B0BS522SRX/" target="_blank"><i>Magic City Blues</i></a>, Peter Farris said: "Somewhere at the great poker game in the sky, Donald Westlake, Robert Parker and James Crumley are raising a glass to <i>Magic City Blues</i>."</div><div><br /></div><div>Now Bobby Mathews is here to chat about that new collection of stories, Negative Tilt.</div><b><div><b><br /></b></div>Steve Weddle</b>: <a href="https://shotgunhoney.com/books/negative-tilt-stories-by-bobby-mathews/" target="_blank">NEGATIVE TILT</a><i>, your collection of 28 stories, comes out March 19 from </i><a href="https://shotgunhoney.com/" style="font-style: italic;">Shotgun Honey</a><i>. Why these stories? Why now? </i><br /><br /><b>Bobby Mathews</b>: Stephen King once wrote that he loved to read Harlan Ellison's short stories because each one was sort of a glimpse into Ellison's art and continued development as a writer — "This is where Harlan is now." That's what NEGATIVE TILT is for me: I look at where I've been, where I currently am, and a glimpse of where I'm going. My hope, of course, is that I'm continuing to grow and learn as I put words on the page.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-n7lZBjnfDlBScEP34w_bQXyj-CPa-j711WrQfbff7M6Ss9KZA3ZDTRfQjGBB0Fmj4UjG7NGYKtAkvYqsi0hWwyfvZYpF4qgpLODoZBn8PXyJXeTuMbEKC_b-cEVVRxnAQ8FVFmMVFlXRFpNuUJuzW7bjM9rB6WCdD0yytrYjYuNGH0CCKuVtQRecamo/s2550/SH-Negative-Tilt-Stories-Mathews-Front-Cover-2024.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2550" data-original-width="1650" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-n7lZBjnfDlBScEP34w_bQXyj-CPa-j711WrQfbff7M6Ss9KZA3ZDTRfQjGBB0Fmj4UjG7NGYKtAkvYqsi0hWwyfvZYpF4qgpLODoZBn8PXyJXeTuMbEKC_b-cEVVRxnAQ8FVFmMVFlXRFpNuUJuzW7bjM9rB6WCdD0yytrYjYuNGH0CCKuVtQRecamo/s320/SH-Negative-Tilt-Stories-Mathews-Front-Cover-2024.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><br />After the failure of my first novel — a self-published book that I still love despite its many flaws — I stopped attempting to publish and wrote very little for about nine years. In 2020, I sent out a story to a magazine called The Dark City, and it was accepted about three weeks after submission. I placed about thirty stories over the course of the next three-plus years. Many of those stories are included in NEGATIVE TILT, along with some new ones that I hope readers will appreciate.<br /> <br /><b>SW</b>: The title story, "Negative Tilt," features a former newspaper man who now drives a tow truck. Your descriptions of working the tow truck seem very detailed. Have you worked a tow truck before?<br /> <br /><b>BM</b>: I worked for three years or so as an investigator for a repossession company, a sort of advance scout for the tow truck drivers. I'd find the vehicles, assist in tying them down to the truck's boom if I needed — "throwing straps" is the colloquial term — and I'd do the investigative work of field interviews to track down and locate debtors. Like any investigative job, there were long stretches of boredom. But there were also elements of excitement and danger, and the assortment of strange and unusual people I worked with can only be rivaled by the weirdos who gravitate toward newspaper work. <br /><br /><b>SW</b>: You've used a hotel room as a setting here. What sort of story could be better set in a hotel room than in a home? If there were a submissions call for hotel room stories, what would be obvious? What would you do? <br /><br /><b>BM</b>: There was a point in my life where I was effectively homeless, and I document some of that in the short story "General Excellence." I would stay in a hot-sheet motel for three nights a week — because I couldn't afford the weekly rate — and crash in my vehicle for a couple of nights before trekking three hours to my ex-girlfriend's apartment, where I would do laundry and try to rest and be "normal' for a day or two before heading back to the job. I drank Faygo sodas because they were cheaper than bottled water or brand-name soft drinks. I ate stuff I could scrounge from leftovers in the office fridge or the cheapest convenience store food I could find. On the job, I was producing the best medium-sized daily sports section in the state, but my personal life was an abject failure. It was a hell of a place to be, and it was unsustainable for long. Those are the kind of details that speak to me, and that's the kind of story I'd submit to a call for hotel/motel room stories.<br /> <br /> My experience leads me to believe that hotel room stories are intrinsically about alienation. If you've got a home to go to, a place to land, you're never truly alienated. But once you don't? Anything and everything becomes possible. In that room where there is nothing permanent, it's easy to see how you've hit rock bottom. The choice for a character — and, obviously for me at the time — is whether you choose to stay at rock bottom or choose to rage against the dying of the light. The stories that speak to me the most are ones where the characters long to return to something or to dig their way out to something new. <br /> <br /><b>SW</b>: A review of MAGIC CITY BLUES said: "Some of the best writing is by authors—like Mathews—who have only written a couple of books. Often, by the time authors have written a half-dozen, the sentences start to get bloated and sloppy." Do you think your newspaper experience has contributed to your writing style? <br /><br /><b>BM</b>: Hemingway famously said "Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time." I didn't get out of it in time. I worked for newspapers for about 20 years, and I still keep a hand in by occasionally writing feature stories and sports coverage for a statewide news organization. The daily writing and editing helps in a couple of ways: First, the job helped me view writing as work and not something that's motivated by a muse or some version of art that I used to have in my head. As a result of having daily deadlines imposed, newspaper writers tend to work very fast and pretty clean, and I produce first drafts that are close to what I want the story to be. But because newspaper work is so fast — and media writing in general has to be even faster now, with immediate publishing to the Web — there is often a tendency to call that first draft good enough. And of course it never really is.<br /> <br /><b>SW</b>: Tell me about a short story you've tried to write but can't. <br /><br /><b>BM</b>: I started a story a couple of years ago that I titled "The Devil I Knew," drawn from my real-life childhood bully, who was convicted in 1995 for two counts of rape, and is now serving a life sentence in a prison located about 20 minutes from where I live. Considering that we grew up maybe 75 yards away from one another on a dirt road three hours south of here, it feels pretty odd. The idea — a man has been sending his childhood bully postcards from vacation spots around the world in order to stick it to him, a vicious little needling to remind him that he's stuck in prison while life for other people moves on. The story starts when the narrator eventually confronts the bully in person but is now physically safe from him because of the prison security apparatus separating them — not too bad, though it's probably been done by much better writers than me. But what keeps me walking away from the story is that I see the racial power dynamic of a free white man and an incarcerated Black man, and can't unsee it. Maybe I could flip the race of the narrator and the bully and make it work — that feels like the simplest solution — but the simplest solution isn't always the best. <br /><br /><b>SW</b>: As a reader, what do you want from a short story? <br /><b><br />BM</b>: I want to be entertained, of course, but I also love being surprised by something new. I think about Jordan Harper's story, "<a href="https://southwestreview.com/volume-108-number-3/my-savage-year/" target="_blank">My Savage Year</a>" in Southwest Review. It's the best short story I've read in the last five years, at least--maybe longer--and every bit of it is a surprise and a pleasure to read. A weird thing to say about a short story where one character annihilates his family, but there it is nonetheless. I love reading stories where not only is the tale itself terrific, but where you can marvel over the craftsmanship of it. <a href="https://www.jamesdfhannah.com/" target="_blank">James D.F. Hannah</a>'s story, 17-Year Cicadas is also an absolute rocker of a noir story and shows the kinds of things that writers are bringing to the genre now. <a href="https://twitter.com/PauljGarth" target="_blank">Paul J. Garth</a> and <a href="https://shotgunhoney.com/authors/hector-acosta/" target="_blank">Hector Acosta</a> had two phenomenal stories in an anthology called The Eviction of Hope. Neither is a mystery story, but both are deeply noir, and they bring something new to mystery/crime genre. I think--hope--many of us are more interested in writing about why someone makes the choices they make rather than paint-by-numbers whodunits. <br /> <br /><b>SW</b>: As a writer, what are your goals in telling a story and how do you know when you've been successful? <br /><br /><b>BM</b>: When I started writing, my first goal was just to be published, you know? Once you hit that goal a few times, though, your outlook changes to something like "I want to write a good story," or "I want to write a story that's worthy of being included with some of my heroes/influences" or "I want to write a story that blows everyone out of the water." My goal with short stories right now is to pursue the craft in the best way I know how and tell the best story I can. The hope that goes alongside that goal, of course, is that people will find those stories and the tales will resonate with them on some level, whether it's mere entertainment or something on a deeper level. For me to know I'm successful, I need to be able to read the story back and not find holes in it, to know that I've touched on something that I wanted to say or an experience I wanted to share or found an emotional gear that I didn't expect.<br /> <br /><b>SW</b>: Finally, is there a character in one of these stories that you'd like to develop further? <br /><br /><b>BM</b>: The lead character in "A Little Push" is a hitwoman masquerading as a true crime podcaster in order to get near her target. There's potential there, I think, for a follow-up. Stories or a novel, I'm not sure. I like the idea of this nameless woman immersing herself into a world so fully that she leaves a void with the people around her once she fulfills the contract and does her final disappearing act, and I hope to revisit her character at some point.<div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">***</div><div><br /></div><br /><b>From the Publisher</b><br /><br /><i>An out-of-work journalist finds a second life ‘stealing cars’; A grad student finds out that theft is easy, but getting away with it is another matter entirely; A long-lost love can’t be rekindled in a remote hotel room, but a long-held ember of anger can be reignited; A tale of murder and mayhem in the Big Easy …<br /><br /></i><div><i>In NEGATIVE TILT: Stories, award-winning author Bobby Mathews shares twenty-eight tales that run the gamut, from a literary punch in the gut to unrequited and lost love to fast-and-hard crime fiction to out-and-out horror that’s hard to turn away from. </i><div> <br /><div style="text-align: center;">***</div><br />“This gripping, wide-ranging collection encompasses backwoods vengeance, Parisian tricksters, a mirror that reflects the crimes of the past, and so much more. Bobby Mathews’ versatility is matched only by the humanity he invests in even his most broken, desperate characters.” <br /><br />—<i>Scott Von Doviak, Edgar Award-nominated author of Lowdown Road and Charlesgate Confidential </i><br /><br />“Most crime writers come on hard, like they want to show the world how tough they are. Bobby Mathews is a different kind of cat: in Negative Tilt, he wants to show you how even the worst of us have a vulnerable heart. This insightfulness and empathy make him one of the best writers working today.” <br /><br />—<i>Nick Kolakowski, author of Payback Is Forever and Love & Bullets </i><br /><br />“Negative Tilt is more than a collection, it’s a body, sprawled out on the table, open and sensitive and bleeding yet furiously, gloriously, alive. With a reporter’s eye for detail, a barbarian’s taste for chaos, a poet’s sense of soul, and a conman’s mastery for turns of phrase, Bobby Mathews announces himself as a vital voice, not just to crime fiction, but also as an heir to Portis, Woodrell, and Hiaasen.” <br /><br />—<i>Paul J. Garth, author of The Low White Plain </i><br /><br /> </div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxFN2UXCxOqpaMzubPE0mKN_ebLIMmHWKYElodx37S5sWuVAOs0lYvteiVCfe2ljaTf6hph24xF_S-Ap-WoVeRNuCLVv1rvma8ebnlaaBHaF1LNwWybuPC9qk8uQlrluF-K27jh9dIfPdV939WJpFx1fmwGtwEhXMB1EEDWEan9huPKNUX_hY4qz3rBCA/s618/NT.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxFN2UXCxOqpaMzubPE0mKN_ebLIMmHWKYElodx37S5sWuVAOs0lYvteiVCfe2ljaTf6hph24xF_S-Ap-WoVeRNuCLVv1rvma8ebnlaaBHaF1LNwWybuPC9qk8uQlrluF-K27jh9dIfPdV939WJpFx1fmwGtwEhXMB1EEDWEan9huPKNUX_hY4qz3rBCA/s320/NT.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://shotgunhoney.com/books/negative-tilt-stories-by-bobby-mathews/" target="_blank">Get your copy</a></div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-47811706367982408592024-03-09T04:00:00.017-05:002024-03-09T04:00:00.133-05:00The Perennial Appeal of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVxTctwVJrPVNBHCRluNZt_2lkI3e0MfqHdg1OFn7tIt_vDLti24WN7v2pQFl88mkKdLEZapjiUkhDQxqjuzAI4k2d7xStm_ovBeXIVikf4K18LE41VJytjbgRxQAUT32q_abLdYHR9bvhau0O7LcJ8-ENX1HjG7ohtfsU4xoCOpGqVzkOn_JGMQZw/s612/war.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="612" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVxTctwVJrPVNBHCRluNZt_2lkI3e0MfqHdg1OFn7tIt_vDLti24WN7v2pQFl88mkKdLEZapjiUkhDQxqjuzAI4k2d7xStm_ovBeXIVikf4K18LE41VJytjbgRxQAUT32q_abLdYHR9bvhau0O7LcJ8-ENX1HjG7ohtfsU4xoCOpGqVzkOn_JGMQZw/w200-h200/war.jpeg" width="200" /></a></div><div>By</div>Scott D. Parker<br /><br /><i>(This is a rerun, originally written in 2022, but this is a perennial reminder that Resistance is always present and we need to keep it at bay.)<br /></i><br /><div>Where has this book been all my writing life? Well, right in front of me, the entire time.<br /><br />I’ve known about Steven Pressfield for a good number of years. In fact, I have his blog feed in my Feedly app and I am a subscriber to his email. But in all that time, I had never sat down and read his most famous non-fiction book: <a href="https://blackirishbooks.com/product/the-war-of-art/">The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles</a>. <br /><br />I guess I just wasn’t ready for it. I believe that there is always a time and place for certain things to occur, and the first quarter of 2022 proved to be especially difficult for my writing life. So difficult, in fact, that I stopped and questioned whether or not I should keep going. Somewhere in that miasma of thoughts and feelings and doubt this book popped in front of my eyes. I had already started back on the upswing via my own journaling but I shrugged and thought why not.<br /><br />Wow. This book opened my eyes, wide, to see that not only was I not alone in my struggles (we all struggle), but Pressfield laid out a definition of my challenges and a roadmap through them. <br /><br />Most importantly, perhaps, was this: Pressfield gave the challenge, the obstacle we all face, a name: Resistance. That is the focus of Book 1 of this short but powerful book. Resistance: Defining the Enemy. Pressfield then goes on to list all the things that Resistance is, such as Internal, Universal, and Insidious. He points out that Resistance is strongest right near the finish list, it often makes you unhappy, and carves a place in your mind for self-doubt and self-rationalization. <br /><br />Very quickly as I started reading the print version of this book I grabbed a pencil and started underlining key passages. I kept underlining all through Book 1, seeing myself in the words. <br /><br />Book 2: Combating Resistance: Turning Pro serves as the antithesis. It is the writer/artist as hero. Key to this section is in the sub-title: Turning Pro. It is the light bulb moment when a writer decides he is no longer just going to write for fun, but to be a professional writer. Pressfield lists many traits of the professional mindset. Personally, I found I already do many of them—is prepared; we show up every day; we are patient; we demystify the writing process—so it made me question why I was in such a state as to even think about quitting. <br /><br />But, as Pressfield states, “The battle is inside our own head.” It always is. Always. It can be frustrating to be in a profession where dwell-doubt is constant, but there you go. The mountaintop experience of a writer/artist is also very high. <br /><br />The last book, Beyond Resistance: The Higher Realm, makes the case for the power of an artist’s way of life. He lays out the evidence that there exists for artist a sometimes magical place where our imaginations and our physical efforts to find our dreams connect. He divides artist into two camps: those that think hierarchically and those that think territorially, using the animal kingdom as an example. By the time I reached the end of the book, pencil tip well worn for underlining so many thing, I smiled. So many of Pressfield’s comments seemed self-evident, and yet I struggled. We all struggle. It is part of the artist’s way of life.<br /><br />But a book like The War of Art clears out the cobwebs of doubt and shows us a way forward.<br /><br />I ended up dictating all the underlined passages into my phone and created a 14-page file. It is my own outline of this important book. I know that I’ll encounter Resistance again. It is inevitable. But I also know a means to overcome it. And I’ve got my own printed set of pages to remind me how.<br /><br />If you are struggling—and even if you’re not—I encourage you to read this book and see if you can turn yourself around.<br /><br />I want to leave you with one of my favorite passages of the entire book. It explains why it is important to create and maintain a writing habit.<br /><br /><blockquote>Someone asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on his schedule for only when struck my inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,“ he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at 9 o’clock sharp.”<br />That’s a pro.<br />In terms of resistance, Maugham was saying, “I despise resistance; I will not let it phase me; I will sit down and do my work. “<br />Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that my performing the Monday and physical active sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his. He knew if he built it, she would come.</blockquote><br /><br /><p></p></div>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-11602575710660082762024-03-05T09:07:00.006-05:002024-03-05T11:08:35.991-05:00Spade and Ripley <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">While watching the series <i>Monsieur Spade</i>, I had a funny thought. Besides whatever connections the show has to Spade's history, the six episodes also play like a kind of weird inversion of the life of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. <i>Monsieur Spade</i> puts Hammett's character in France in 1955. He has come there to bring a girl who is Bridget O'Shaughnessy's daughter to her French father and leave her there. He has no intention of staying in France. But then things happen and he winds up staying at the estate of a French widow, who he marries. She dies soon enough (not violently), and the main part of the story picks up eight years later, with Spade having inherited his wife's estate and living out his days peacefully, in the French countryside, until a series of sinister events draws him back into his old ways of investigation and danger.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip1EmFcQOnGCyry1opRHxd2DNiVS7ZTQhvH8wtIc6YlnqKZ82833MuMC0Cfr1SCjs8rFHH09Fp-0WmEaSKEolE27ne9Vd2-TE7IF5IBi5qU6M0rbjdkk4U9lYqKpEv_L2wgEN-mNJpcUYFVQncgKxSNAXWbGorNRxT4uluC5snb9fJwkJuQNDjdLQYKVLV/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip1EmFcQOnGCyry1opRHxd2DNiVS7ZTQhvH8wtIc6YlnqKZ82833MuMC0Cfr1SCjs8rFHH09Fp-0WmEaSKEolE27ne9Vd2-TE7IF5IBi5qU6M0rbjdkk4U9lYqKpEv_L2wgEN-mNJpcUYFVQncgKxSNAXWbGorNRxT4uluC5snb9fJwkJuQNDjdLQYKVLV/s1600/download.jpg" width="275" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">So we have Spade in rural France, the American expat living comfortably, man with a tangled past, master of a lovely domestic domain. Doesn't this sound a bit like Tom Ripley, post Dickie Greenleaf, once he has set himself up in France? Spade marries a French heiress and settles into a life of leisure; Ripley marries a French heiress, Heloise Plisson, and settles into a life of domestic ease. Spade's estate -- big pool, huge house, elegantly furnished, a vineyard -- is a place to die for; Ripley has his spacious place called Belle Ombre. </span></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZxB_NM0IHpwowjERxc7oRO7xLkv41QQwzg9Bv7zlqMw73Dg9Cbly74IbnDUlpMfUBmArEksN_cJkw1_bje8c2WQH47enHra0Jr1USroh-9Vq9U23AmlUz53X0DtNbDhiOOUqNbfqcEiri15WfYhhzKvKtqsvmuGDUgJAwzY7jPvWngu_FoMqOOJM9cW-/s259/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZxB_NM0IHpwowjERxc7oRO7xLkv41QQwzg9Bv7zlqMw73Dg9Cbly74IbnDUlpMfUBmArEksN_cJkw1_bje8c2WQH47enHra0Jr1USroh-9Vq9U23AmlUz53X0DtNbDhiOOUqNbfqcEiri15WfYhhzKvKtqsvmuGDUgJAwzY7jPvWngu_FoMqOOJM9cW-/s1600/download.jpg" width="259" /></span></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Of course, Spade and Ripley, as human beings, are quite different, and how their lives play out in France reflects this. Spade wants nothing more than to be left alone and live his life in peace, but he gets drawn into a case that puts him at great risk. The case involves political actors tied to what is going on between France and Algeria at the time, and throughout the series, we see Spade's unerring moral compass at work. Hard-bitten as he is, he cannot but try to do what he sees as the "right" thing, though "right" is almost always impure and compromised. But the point is that he does get caught up in a situation with implications that extend well beyond himself. Such involvement in political affairs is something Tom Ripley would never allow himself, though in the four books after <i>The Talented Mr. Ripley</i>, from his French home base, he likewise commits himself to all sorts of hazardous activity. He's an anti-Spade, in a sense, devoted to himself only and to what suits him. In a certain odd way, the adventures of Spade in <i>Monsieur Spade </i>and of Ripley in his books after the first one play like mirror images of each other.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Monsieur Spade</i> was co-created by Scott Frank and Tom Fontana. Each has a long list of crime show and crime movie credits to his name. The many-stranded plot of the series includes one centered around a mysterious Arab boy who has, we are told, an uncanny code-breaking ability. He never speaks so he seems like some sort of savant. This is, then, at least the third time that Frank has shown a fascination with preternaturally talented children, starting with the screenplay he wrote years ago for the Jodie Foster-directed film <i>Little Man Tate</i>. That was about a prodigal child, and years later Frank adapted the Walter Tevis novel, <i>Queen's Gambit</i>. The main character there shows a genius for chess at a young age. So this part of <i>Monsieur Spade</i> -- the young boy with a remarkable ability -- derives from what evidently is a Scott Frank interest, not so much anything from Hammett. And it has nothing to do with the <i>Monsieur Spade</i>/Ripley contrasts either (I just thought I'd mention it because I find it interesting), though the pre-pubescent girl that Spade brings to France at the series' outset and then winds up caring for after she has to leave the convent where he stashed her, brought to my mind Frank Pierson, the character in <i>The Boy Who Followed Ripley</i>. </div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilhdDORbpwxcw6NXtNDC9Bn5TT8ZwE1cQejusWRWE-r9LvUinAlsNqhW9mKirXOeATs9Yxifuh5vbjW2WtTiFoeElAbRueGWM-bQux1vvhyphenhyphen_DC4BXWTCXLNWrp7jKQuyq-Uwd4KTW5B3DfArF2wLBIA6O_U5GKAWT-yenZURk6xzg4RI6XBEqpHzRq0CEA/s299/Spade.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="299" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilhdDORbpwxcw6NXtNDC9Bn5TT8ZwE1cQejusWRWE-r9LvUinAlsNqhW9mKirXOeATs9Yxifuh5vbjW2WtTiFoeElAbRueGWM-bQux1vvhyphenhyphen_DC4BXWTCXLNWrp7jKQuyq-Uwd4KTW5B3DfArF2wLBIA6O_U5GKAWT-yenZURk6xzg4RI6XBEqpHzRq0CEA/s1600/Spade.jpg" width="299" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Again, we have an inversion. Spade <span style="text-align: justify;">brings Teresa, the girl, to France; Pierson is a runaway. Teresa, over the six installments, studies Spade and takes on some of his attributes; Pierson is a young murderer with some of the same character qualities as Ripley. In any event, if Highsmith's novel is called </span><i style="text-align: justify;">The Boy Who Followed Ripley</i><span style="text-align: justify;">, <i>Monsieur Spade</i> could be sub-titled "The Girl Who Followed Spade". Except that there is no way Ripley's relationship with a disturbed boy is going to end well, while Spade only grows closer to Teresa as the series progresses, and the final scene actually ends with her copying a specific action he does, a scene both cute and appropriate. I don't envision Sam Spade being a cuddly sort of dad, but I'd much rather have him as my caretaker than Ripley.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Is there any significance to the apparent <i>Monsieur Spade</i> and Ripley connections? I'm sure not. And I'm certainly not stating that Scott Frank and Tom Fontana had any of this in mind when writing their show. But regardless, it is something that struck me as <i>Monsieur Spade</i> unfolded, a possible correspondence between crime fiction worlds with entirely different moral perspectives. Fun speculation.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-839505793701797312024-03-02T04:00:00.003-05:002024-03-02T04:00:00.289-05:00When There Are Too Many Books and Too Little Time, Optimize Your Reading<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkMqX7CewWZqRknqTnEhavsTbYTIE-xsqPp2orwM7RKfZVW_Wb1W6Nmwlg0XSFkEh3Ph4l_k_QMCRC0E9ar0MxtX52MFUsvHLnuIhWstbCA7FeSzI2Jo7w-eat_0GWmQdhBF9HeXyFp_4llkuJ5thrnR7lPx6nQTYlz0NhytNNs0Xw-ifBPzHXTqtlYv4/s640/Stack%20of%20Books-pexels-engin-akyurt-2946979.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkMqX7CewWZqRknqTnEhavsTbYTIE-xsqPp2orwM7RKfZVW_Wb1W6Nmwlg0XSFkEh3Ph4l_k_QMCRC0E9ar0MxtX52MFUsvHLnuIhWstbCA7FeSzI2Jo7w-eat_0GWmQdhBF9HeXyFp_4llkuJ5thrnR7lPx6nQTYlz0NhytNNs0Xw-ifBPzHXTqtlYv4/s320/Stack%20of%20Books-pexels-engin-akyurt-2946979.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>By</div><div>Scott D. Parker</div><div><br /></div><div>It started with The Six Million Dollar Man.</div><div><br /></div><div>A few weeks ago, I learned that the debut of one of my favorite childhood TV shows occurred fifty years ago. With that in mind, I thought about going back and rewatching the series, this time with adult eyes, and see how it holds up. When I got to the Peacock, I realized there were 99 episodes. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don’t have time for that, so I went to Google and conducted a search of the Top 10 episodes of the show. Thankfully, the Bigfoot episodes are in there as well as a few crossovers with The Bionic Woman (weren’t those epic episodes!). Now, armed with my manageable list, I have a few episodes to rewatch and then decide whether or not I want to keep watching other episodes.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Reacher</h3><div><br /></div><div>I’m deep into the second (of two) seasons of the Reacher TV, but I’m one of those viewers who has never read any of the books by Lee Child. Since I’m really enjoying the series, I thought I might look into reading some of the Reacher books. As soon as I got to my Libby app, I noticed two things. There are more than thirty books and short stories from which to choose. And they’re nearly all checked out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Still, with thirty stories, I don’t have time for all of them—and still read all the other things I want to read. But before I headed off to the internet, I had a chance encounter in the office breakroom.</div><div><br /></div><div>There’s a particular co-worker with whom I chat Star Wars stuff, but I asked him about the Reacher TV show. He said he has already watched both seasons…and he’s read a number of the books. I saw my chance. I asked him if he could give me his Top 5 books. Charged with such a monumental task, he said he’d ponder the question and get back with me. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Agatha Christie</h3><div><br /></div><div>As these two things permeated through my head, I realized I was already doing something like it with Agatha Christie. Each year, the folks at AgathaChristie.com create a list of twelve books to read, one per month. For an author with such an extensive bibliography, something like this is good for the Christie newbie.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ditto for James Patterson. And Stephen King. And Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb. And Clive Cussler. And Erle Stanley Gardner. And James Rollins. And Mary Higgins Clark. And you name the author. </div><div><br /></div><div>So what do you do when you discover an author (or TV show or comic book) that has a decent number of books/episodes/issues and you want to start?</div><div><br /></div><div>Years ago in a grocery store, I saw the cover of The Race by Clive Cussler. It instantly intrigued me so I found out the series name—Isaac Bell—and ended up starting on Book 1. It took a few months to finally get to book that captured my attention, but there weren’t many total books in that series.</div><div><br /></div><div>I stopped doing that ever since. If there’s a book that catches my eye, I’ll just read that book. It doesn’t matter if it’s book 23 or not.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Optimized Reading</h3><div><br /></div><div>But when I’m coming in cold to something like Lee Child—with covers that barely have any imagery—I head to the internet and do some research. I call it optimized reading. If I like something, I’ll keep reading. If not, then the opinions of veteran readers can let me know pretty quickly if I’m going to like a particular author.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because let’s face it: the number of books we want to read does not equal the time available to read. So why not optimize the selection process?</div>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-9386436311462253112024-02-28T08:17:00.007-05:002024-02-28T08:38:45.244-05:00The Reason AI Novels Stink<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjFUtmq4rIM1jHn2y-qGp1nD38is0THx3mCLzwxv7JGb_GsGqA6aexXeBW_flEp3AeccXz7AZcPYLziuT7RtHcy235U7NAAGbSCBL1fuHHu4GttFbUirZuDOx1KaVhos_PE5L3pJ4FJcithXa1HrVqvLmP7RJJDShqFiQwFihXl7xK3jZrS8kVyyqjEPow" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="594" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjFUtmq4rIM1jHn2y-qGp1nD38is0THx3mCLzwxv7JGb_GsGqA6aexXeBW_flEp3AeccXz7AZcPYLziuT7RtHcy235U7NAAGbSCBL1fuHHu4GttFbUirZuDOx1KaVhos_PE5L3pJ4FJcithXa1HrVqvLmP7RJJDShqFiQwFihXl7xK3jZrS8kVyyqjEPow" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">By <a href="https://www.amazon.com/TheCountyLine" target="_blank">Steve Weddle</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've seen authors share this idea around the internet quite a bit the past few days. "I think the best response I've seen to AI anything has been, 'Why should I bother reading something that nobody could be bothered to write.'"</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I certainly appreciate the sentiment of author-centric storytelling, but find the premise here a bit off.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I do not read a book simply because someone has written it. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Imagine walking in to your local indie bookstore and asking to see the books written by people.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Again, I take no issue with the idea of supporting authors who author over computer-generated writing, but being written by a person is not what makes a book good.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Let's look at it this way.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There's a television program called Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that program, roughly every twenty-seven minutes, a character called Jean-Luc Picard walks to the replicator and asks for "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." He is provided, by the computer, a cup of tea, which he seems to enjoy.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have never heard him proclaim that he can't be bothered to drink a cup of tea that nobody could be bothered to brew. He enjoys the cup of tea, presumably for its taste, though he might as well appreciate the warmth, the feeling of comfort, and so forth. The origin of the thing does not impact his enjoyment of the thing.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have read many books (well, parts of many books) that I did not enjoy, though they were written by humans. Why should I bother reading something that I don't enjoy?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The problems with AI-generated fiction, it seems to me, are bountiful.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The writing is flat and uninspired. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">AI-generated content is shallow mimicry, disconnected from any empathy we crave in our fiction.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Since the source material is only what has come before, the possibility of something new arriving on the scene is diminished. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Also, as study after study has shown us, the fiction marketplace lacks diversity, so you're going to get the same old thing over and over, if you rely on AI. For every Yuri Herrera book, there are 281 James Patterson thrillers. (Nothing against Patterson, but he's no Yuri Herrera.) </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">AI-generated novels will merely provide more of the same, which will increase the data set for future AI-generated novels that rely on learned patterns & soon we end up with nothing but a series of Frank Norris novels. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I don't read novels <i>because</i> they were written by humans, but the books I do read were written by humans. I expect to keep reading books written by humans. I want the human experience, the creativity, the brilliance. I even want to read those novels that try to do something amazing and end up failing. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I love messy novels. For example, I thought <i>The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu</i> was a glorious, fantastic, amazing book that was nearly as messy as it was beautiful. There were parts of the storyline that never resolved in the way that would satisfy the holodeck on the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D). That's some of what I loved about the book. When I read that story, I could see the author reaching out, working through plot and character and telling this story, no matter where it went. I finished that book thinking how thankful I was that the book wasn't edited by someone in a foul mood, but rather by someone who let the story go where it wanted to go. (I don't know who edited that book, but they should have medals for that kind of work.) I found it so reassuring that Tom Lin was able to carry the reader along on that maniacal journey, something no AI will ever be able to do. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You know, I think that Captain Picard might also like to get his tea from a person, rather than from an indentation in the wall. With tea or coffee or milkshakes prepared by people, I've rarely stepped in the same river twice. A cup of coffee from a vending machine will always be the same level of terrible, but a flat white from Espresso Yourself might be a delight one day and marginally dreadful the next.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I like being excited by a new book. I like diving in, not knowing what to expect. I like the wild turns that happen at twenty-five percent or fifty-nine percent of a novel. I just finished <i>The Book of Goose</i>, and that is one wild ride that completely took me by surprise. No AI could have ever created Agnès and Fabienne.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The idea that we read books because people bothered to write them only takes us so far. People have also bothered to write lousy books. (I'm looking at you, Emily Bronte.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That a person wrote a book is not reason enough for me to read a book. <br /><br />I read not because a person bothered to write a book, but because only a book written by a talented, troubled, creative, original, dedicated human can tell a story that disturbs and challenges me -- that bothers me -- in so many new and glorious ways.</div><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-36082342205069025822024-02-24T04:00:00.005-05:002024-02-24T04:00:00.170-05:00True Detective: Night Country Asks an Interesting Question: What if The Thing Was a Murder Mystery? <span id="docs-internal-guid-52d6d44c-7fff-567d-cad3-5861456b19d1"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLeKUS4nDpC-x2ROqeXUWzs7fdOkqX-qcD5PG1wyId_fwfRx1tdmlFwY89W66PazbN1VTX6BtBdfVVFAxpU5nNpkU0-7XxdauTFD4RMreRv5UBNAjG9dYisdGM8GbG7y1kDD661xzD_UlrkOix9Yz7XzG-nAzL1ZkUMpzHmyR2rJtgSjnuFZq72lRE2J4/s370/True_Detective_season_4.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLeKUS4nDpC-x2ROqeXUWzs7fdOkqX-qcD5PG1wyId_fwfRx1tdmlFwY89W66PazbN1VTX6BtBdfVVFAxpU5nNpkU0-7XxdauTFD4RMreRv5UBNAjG9dYisdGM8GbG7y1kDD661xzD_UlrkOix9Yz7XzG-nAzL1ZkUMpzHmyR2rJtgSjnuFZq72lRE2J4/s320/True_Detective_season_4.png" width="216" /></a></div>By</span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Scott D. Parker</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m a True Detective newbie but I was all-in on the fourth season, True Detective: Night Country. Why? Jodie Foster. And the setting.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know Foster moved behind the camera for a long time and she did some great work. She directed an episode of the science fiction show “Tales from the Loop” a few years ago and I really enjoyed that series. Last year she co-starred with Annette Bening in “Nyad,” a movie I’ve not seen (but will now). Thus, Night Country is the first acting performance I’ve seen in a long time. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She’s fantastic! She’s hard, stern, dogged, determined, and occasionally unlikeable. In a recent podcast episode, Marc Bernardin mentioned that Foster was enticed by the script written by Issa Lopez but wanted her character, Police </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Chief Liz Danvers of Ennis, Alaska, to be more irritating. I suspect Lopez was initially surprised at the request, but fulfilled it nonetheless.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other main actress is Kali Reis. She plays Trooper Evangeline Navarro. Navarro and Danvers have history—because of course they do—but must work together again to solve the case with deep ramifications to the town. Navarro has some indigenous heritage that she draws on and deals with, a theme I’ve noticed with lots of recent shows I’ve watched (like Reservation Dogs, Tin Star, Resident Alien, and Alaska Daily). Like Foster, Reis is excellent with saying a lot but not always with words. </span></p><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Setting</span></h3><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The story takes place in Alaska at the Winter Solstice. In this portion of Alaska, the Winter Solstice means the sun doesn’t rise for weeks. As someone who gets irritated when it’s merely cloudy here in Houston for a few days, I could not live in that environment. At all. There’s a foreboding when it’s always dark. It’s claustrophobic. It’s unnerving. And people live in places like that all the time.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This setting pretty much makes the town and the surrounding environs another character. The show puts nearly every viewer in a situation wholly unfamiliar, and pieces out bits of information in dribs and drabs. It was wonderful to be immersed in something so new yet so foreign.</span></p><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Story</span></h3><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you watched the trailer, you probably got instant vibes from John Carpenter’s The Thing. I really appreciated how Lopez drew me into the show and its main crime—the murder of a group of scientists in a research lab—with the possibility of the supernatural as well as good old-fashioned natural violence. I’ve read that along with The Thing, another inspiration for her story was the original Alien (1979) and its ominous setting. Well, it worked.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other thing that worked was the ending. I didn’t see it coming, and that is a huge testament to my enjoyment of the six-episode series. Too often, the tried and true tropes come out to play and you just go along for the ride, especially if you like the characters and actors. I’m fine with those types of stories, but when something new and original comes along, it’s so refreshing.</span></p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-63938078580386589312024-02-20T08:25:00.003-05:002024-02-20T18:06:29.391-05:00Reading Hammett and Proust at The Same Time<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In conjunction with watching the series <i>Monsieur Spade</i> (about which more next week perhaps), I decided to do some Sam Spade reading. There's not much of it, of course, just <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> and three short stories, but I'd never read two of the three Spade stories before. So in addition to re-reading "A Man Called Spade", the longest of his stories, I read "Too Many Have Lived" and "They Can Only Hang You Once". They're all solid Hammett stories, written in his sharp, not-a-wasted-word style. Sentences are short, and we get little to no writing that goes inside the characters' minds. We get gestures, actions, facial descriptions, descriptions of conversational tones. Explorations of characters' mental states we do not get, though we can infer a lot about what people are thinking from their actions, words, how they present themselves and so on. Hammett, like Hemingway, uses the iceberg approach to writing. You see the top tip of the iceberg and not the seven eighths of it underwater, but you're certainly aware of what's below the surface. The Theory of Omission, as the Iceberg Theory of writing is also called, allows for a lot of interesting ambiguity in a story, which Hammett excels at.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-RxlCM3SYNAdB8qDDjXoFTvGi1PcNVi2Egh3PBje0CRNEi29K3v9FGTMt1cZUTybQ0Z7QBVI438Mw3HrsQ9O0MzqihcxRPBHc-323zbylBoRwDR5Rd597HbhCuYHeY_KkmNhcbk9uO_CFIijTF8qkEwXUIBpCJEWpZXM7x8CDSTfP6s1rpEC4V4jAPor/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-RxlCM3SYNAdB8qDDjXoFTvGi1PcNVi2Egh3PBje0CRNEi29K3v9FGTMt1cZUTybQ0Z7QBVI438Mw3HrsQ9O0MzqihcxRPBHc-323zbylBoRwDR5Rd597HbhCuYHeY_KkmNhcbk9uO_CFIijTF8qkEwXUIBpCJEWpZXM7x8CDSTfP6s1rpEC4V4jAPor/s1600/download.jpg" width="183" /></span></a></div><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><p style="color: #202124; text-align: justify;">Now while reading the Sam Spade stories, which I did on the subway going to and from work, I also was reading Marcel Proust. About a year ago, after decades of pondering the massive work, I finally plunged into <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>. My plan, if I can do it (and assuming I like it) is to read the entire thing before I die. Time is limited these days, with so much reading getting done in short snippets, especially during the work week, so I decided that the way I'd read Proust would be to read two to three to five pages a night, most nights, before bed. At this rate, it'll take me years to get through <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>, maybe almost as long as it took Proust to write it (not that long really, I'm exaggerating), but reading it this way, I can take my time and really savor what I'm reading. Besides, as I knew going in, Proust is someone you sort of have to read slowly, or at least I do; he's not hard to read (like, say, Joyce from <i>Ulysses</i> on can be hard to to read), but he does demand full attention and patience. All those long sentences, all the incredibly detailed descriptions of nearly everything, the introspection upon introspection upon reflection upon yet more reflection of the events long gone by -- we are firmly in the Narrator's mind and this is writing that is majestically unhurried. You cannot do justice to this type of writing by trying to rush through the reading.</p><p style="color: #202124;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: #202124; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6HkJ9FxvdMrZZCnytLmzh_C8hh7moTEkKQC-BmDukQ0dCgjbz1Lez3W4XlqSY_hkxCn9e1YHaByrCtAppyWv5iOUrjlykX7em6ce52-MVfb9TcaUo5QkPcDO_McJXummxc9X26s5Swplk2z1ZB1lctCBKwlYX7Ud6fdpIXkdfl4cQcvs_mt6jTnXaHgen/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="184" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6HkJ9FxvdMrZZCnytLmzh_C8hh7moTEkKQC-BmDukQ0dCgjbz1Lez3W4XlqSY_hkxCn9e1YHaByrCtAppyWv5iOUrjlykX7em6ce52-MVfb9TcaUo5QkPcDO_McJXummxc9X26s5Swplk2z1ZB1lctCBKwlYX7Ud6fdpIXkdfl4cQcvs_mt6jTnXaHgen/s1600/download.jpg" width="184" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202124;"><br /></span></div><span style="color: #202124;"><div style="text-align: justify;">But it's interesting. As I read the Spade stories by day and continued on with Proust at night, I realized I could not have picked two more different writers to read at the same time. One is almost entirely about introspection, the other very much about surface. That's not to say Hammett doesn't achieve depth; he does, but it's of an entirely different sort than Proust's. But I also realized, reading both, that one of the pleasures I'm getting out of reading Proust, even at a few pages a night, is the pleasure of reading someone who does write long, complex, fascinating-in-themselves sentences. It's said that Proust spoke as he wrote, in long sentences, with dependent clause following dependent clause, while the listener had to wait for the sentence's verb to finally come, and one can believe that. Nobody could write as he does without having a thought process that functions that way. And I find that reading him comes as a welcome change from all the crime fiction I read, and fiction in general I read, that tends to follow the short sentence model. At its most extreme, you get the staccato sentence model. So much fiction is made up of clipped, terse, to-the-bone sentences. So much fiction is "spare". It's definitely the dominant mode now, and that's fine. Anyway, it's hard to imagine the material of crime fiction, for example, fitting something like a Proustian model. That would be crime fiction trying to achieve effects entirely different than what most crime fiction aims for. But I find now that it can be a pleasure to pick up writing that does have an entirely different rhythm, that conveys what it does in long, syntactically complex sentences, if for no other reason than to exercise a different reading muscle than is usually required, and right now, nobody could fit that bill better than Marcel Proust.</div></span><p style="color: #202124;"></p></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202124;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><p style="text-align: justify;">PS: I should add that after that reading Proust or any other long sentence master for awhile, it is always enjoyable to go back to someone who writes primarily short sentences, and reading Hammett's Sam Spade stories certainly was that.</p></span></span><p></p>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-85331725287339832652024-02-17T04:00:00.005-05:002024-02-17T04:00:00.144-05:00A Maverick Pathologist (Mostly) Seeks the Truth: Harrow Season 1 <div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDoRESLTdBDaBvrBankaAVVVGHWe8ZAE1JsL7r4rYt9uMAn7_6ab0vJDN6pzd2yJsarNuQH5uBRRC93VoIlT6TGoqUjO-5Bu1xS3Zu1mAx23Q9jAAnwjr-EY05sakXESMAXWUBmslpvOlg8KvSWqzQ1EgP3STHg7we_iSembYI2ceq_vWG414ofZ806mM/s3000/harrow.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="2000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDoRESLTdBDaBvrBankaAVVVGHWe8ZAE1JsL7r4rYt9uMAn7_6ab0vJDN6pzd2yJsarNuQH5uBRRC93VoIlT6TGoqUjO-5Bu1xS3Zu1mAx23Q9jAAnwjr-EY05sakXESMAXWUBmslpvOlg8KvSWqzQ1EgP3STHg7we_iSembYI2ceq_vWG414ofZ806mM/s320/harrow.png" width="213" /></a></div>by</div><div>Scott D. Parker</div><div><br /></div><div>I actually laughed when I watched the first fifteen minutes of the pilot episode of the Australian TV show, Harrow, that ran for three seasons from 2018 to 2021. I then chuckled at the last minute as well.</div><div><br /></div><div>Why? Because the script did exactly what a pilot is supposed to do: Introduce you to the character(s) and then hook you good enough to watch the next episode. Done and done.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Characters</h3><div><br /></div><div>Daniel Harrow (Ioan Gruffudd) is a forensic pathologist based in Queensland. He is a maverick in the department, brilliant of course, lives on a boat, and always rankling the higher-ups and his more uptight peers. He always wants to know the ‘why’ of a case and doesn’t always go for the simple answer that would clear the case from the books in an efficient manner. He is divorced but still keeps in contact with his ex and his teenaged daughter is, well, homeless and a wanderer. </div><div><br /></div><div>Harrow is often teamed with police officer Soroya Dass (Mirrah Foulkes) and they work well together. Naturally sparks begin to fly as they do in TV shows (and real life). Remy Hii plays Simon, the young protege of Harrow and Damien Garvey plays the gruff, older detective who is a bulldog on his cases.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Setting</h3><div><br /></div><div>While this might all sound like typical police procedural TV show stuff—and it is—what makes it cool is the setting and the larger story arc of Season 1. Australian shows don’t always make it to America and, as a fan of British TV shows, it’s great to see something different. And I never tire of the accents. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Season-Long Story Arc</h3><div><br /></div><div>The folks who created Harrow have taken their cue from The X-Files and other successful programs and created the nice blend of murder-of-the-week and a larger, bigger story. </div><div><br /></div><div>Remember that hook I mentioned at the end of episode 1? Well, it serves as the entry point to the entire season. It set up ten episodes of “how will that affect things?” and “Oh crap, that’s not good” and other moments that keep you engaged and interested. </div><div><br /></div><div>Man, I really want to say more, but to do so would put this in spoiler territory. And I’d like you to watch the first episode (on the CW streaming app; yeah, they have one and don’t ask my how or why Harrow is there) and experience it for yourself.</div><div><br /></div><div>My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the first season, all the way up to its cliffhanger ending. You see? Good creators always know how to set the hook and reel you in.</div>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-84184895196418120712024-02-10T04:00:00.008-05:002024-02-10T04:00:00.145-05:00Being in the Room to Witness Creativity<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiF-2K9eiaHSPFDRr26oAhmZ050IUeCJ4QeZ468UoRxGrtCszHHR_Ihx6W40LEPnGpuUvt-CKA9WMU7FCTCXPCG38Xnbbza8_5MXjdpt6TrcFuhafOMRYpkXipIEFagE5o_jsr9zya2E3DwT7DVGPbzYTTVwlAqiP4vWE9-YMvvZGDYJQxMjZlDzSgvps/s382/The_Greatest_Night_in_Pop_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="258" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiF-2K9eiaHSPFDRr26oAhmZ050IUeCJ4QeZ468UoRxGrtCszHHR_Ihx6W40LEPnGpuUvt-CKA9WMU7FCTCXPCG38Xnbbza8_5MXjdpt6TrcFuhafOMRYpkXipIEFagE5o_jsr9zya2E3DwT7DVGPbzYTTVwlAqiP4vWE9-YMvvZGDYJQxMjZlDzSgvps/w135-h200/The_Greatest_Night_in_Pop_poster.jpg" width="135" /></a></div>By<p></p><p>Scott D. Parker</p><p>I love to know how things are made. It’s one of the main reasons why I buy the DVDs of my favorite movies—other than, you know, ownership—because there are behind-the-scenes featurettes and interviews with the creators. </p><p>I think this started back in the Star Wars days of the 1970s when I would read all about how George Lucas and company created the movie that changed the trajectory of so many lives. I loved how they raided model shops to create the Death Star and used miniatures, models, and matte paintings to create the galaxy far, far away. How many of us picked up our own cameras to make our own movies? I see a lot of hands out there.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Books</h3><p>The written word is an odd thing. It’s all in the writer’s head. You can read excerpts and deleted drafts if you want, but it’s all rather frustrating not to be able to have, say, a video with writers giving you a running commentary of their thought process. Granted, I do talk to myself sometimes. Hey, I know I’m not alone. Another show of hands. Hmm, fewer. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Music</h3><p>Music, on the other hand, is chock full of behind-the-scenes content. It can range from filmed snippets that showed up on VHS tapes back in the day to feature-length examples like the Beatles film Peter Jackson put out a few years ago. I love seeing how all the music and songs we know by heart and sing at the top of our lungs in the shower came to be </p><p>And I’ve got a new one for you.</p><p>The Greatest Night in Pop: A We Are the World Documentary</p><p>I first heard about this on The Ralph Report, a daily podcast hosted by Ralph Garman. Curious, I brought it up to my wife on Thursday night and she was game.</p><p>The title of the documentary tells you everything you need to know. Director Bao Nguyen follows Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Quincey Jones as they took a suggestion from Harry Belefonte to write an American answer to the Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” That song was released in early December 1984 and about seven weeks later, the new song was complete.</p><p>But not before a long, long night of recording.</p><p>You know the tune. You can probably sing it right now without a single note as a cue. I’m right there with you. But did you know Stevie Wonder suggested an additional element? Or how Richie and Jackson came up with the melody and lyrics? How about all those individual solo parts that became so famous? Who would sing what? For how many words? Or the doubt some of the singers had for their certain sections. Or the role Stevie Wonder played in the Bob Dylan section. Or the fact that Bob Geldof, the man behind Band Aid and later in 1985, Live Aid, was in the room before the recording began to set the stage for the evening.</p><p>It is fascinating. </p><p>There is a mix of current interviews with Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick, Huey Lewis, and others where they reflect on the experience. For those artists no longer with us, Nguyen drops in some older interviews to fill in the blanks.</p><p>There was a moment—specifically the segment with Steve Perry and Daryl Hall—when I heard those familiar voices and heard those sung lines and tears welled up in my eyes. I looked over to my wife who was also wiping away tears. We both laughed yet we couldn’t quite put our finger on why we both became emotional. Perhaps it was the specialness of the once-in-a-lifetime event. Perhaps it was the fact that the recording is now 39 years in the past and we are all 39 years older and yet we can’t wrap our heads around that fact.</p><p>I don’t know, but I highly recommend this documentary on Netflix if not for the time-machine quality of it, but to witness creativity in action.</p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-2433756937276461242024-02-06T08:44:00.005-05:002024-02-06T08:44:38.684-05:00Saltburn<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">What do you do when you agree with many of the criticisms about something, a book or film, for example, but still enjoy that something? The answer is obvious -- just enjoy the book or film for what it is. I had that experience watching <i>Saltburn</i> the other day, a film I wound up liking more than I thought I would.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGrrg6CjoRZcymyxfmLqexfhRvvakJcRT8ZDkmDfizw10U1odeVpSJdKqhoo_C3We93erh2mzeW-Q9OVb1vnNOZxk8kDtv0zZ4GkIJdyCUw2bYOq6HJLFVo7mz42qNBSWF832iC-afLmzYrqizpl0GXiuRuctFgQlHAKd1j3MQccSMQWJpPiHEfiiV2zWT/s300/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGrrg6CjoRZcymyxfmLqexfhRvvakJcRT8ZDkmDfizw10U1odeVpSJdKqhoo_C3We93erh2mzeW-Q9OVb1vnNOZxk8kDtv0zZ4GkIJdyCUw2bYOq6HJLFVo7mz42qNBSWF832iC-afLmzYrqizpl0GXiuRuctFgQlHAKd1j3MQccSMQWJpPiHEfiiV2zWT/s1600/download.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">If, broadly speaking, the film is a mix between a country house story like Evelyn Waugh's <i>Brideshead Revisited</i> and Patricia Highsmith's <i>The Talented Mr. Ripley</i>, it's the country house part that works well and glides along smoothly and the Ripley part that is somewhat clunky. By the time I saw the film, I was clued in that Oliver, the Barry Keoghan character, is manipulative and somewhat monstrous, but that he isn't who he seems to be is without question, as others have pointed out, not at all hard to predict. You may not predict just how far he'll go in his actions and act out on his sexual frustrations, but I can see why writer and director Emerald Fennell has downplayed the Ripley connections. <i>Saltburn</i> is hardly a thriller. And there are no points weaker in the film than its scenes toward the end sort of laying out the final revelations of the plot. Seeing all the pieces of a puzzle laid out rather clumsily when no laying out of the puzzle is needed makes the final few minutes, till perhaps the final scene, feel perfunctory. Over explaining is never good, and this goes double for over explaining what's easy for the audience to put together. But in <i>Saltburn</i> the fun is had in the getting there. It's the journey that gives pleasure here, not so much the foreordained destination.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I love country house stories and none more than <i>Brideshead Revisted</i>, both the novel and the old British TV miniseries adaptation. <i>Saltburn</i> clearly hearkens back to Waugh's great book in its overall structure. Oliver is invited to the family country estate as Charles Ryder in <i>Brideshead</i> is invited to Brideshead by aristocratic Sebastian Flyte. The object of Oliver's fascination, Felix, has a vulnerable sister, Venetia, just like Sebastian does in Julia. The parents of Felix and his sister figure prominently as Sebastian and Julia's parents do. But is <i>Saltburn</i> a satire of <i>Brideshead</i> and country house stories of its ilk? That's the stange thing. <i>Saltburn</i> isn't incisive enough in any way to work well as true satire. As others have said, it does come across as a hollow film in some ways. It gives you this look at class and desire and frustration and covetousness without really saying much about them all that interesting. People can be rich and idle and interesting, and have depth, as, say, in <i>Brideshead</i>, but in <i>Saltburn</i>, they are purposely made flat, one-dimensional. But as performed by everyone, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant and Carey Mulligan in particular, they are very amusing. This is indeed a sort of pulp fantasy version of a country house story, with some Gothic touches. The movie, up until all the clumsy exposition, is a lark. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLI61EHgTB5LTn2fQvY78VLKJaTnNUob5SCSzpbs_Ge3jdDBXNpZtAeGjs5EUaHOS1lvWb9i51yHrkb9v2a9bGwjIHc-r3IFLFtrX7BDp0_y4eWg7Egr9MQlJGnss_BnQG2s3y46eUuzew9sGr6tgaaI2ZnkYQeYbOe8-c8oQLnTvjdwzAvHIoAjZTA3Oj/s299/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="299" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLI61EHgTB5LTn2fQvY78VLKJaTnNUob5SCSzpbs_Ge3jdDBXNpZtAeGjs5EUaHOS1lvWb9i51yHrkb9v2a9bGwjIHc-r3IFLFtrX7BDp0_y4eWg7Egr9MQlJGnss_BnQG2s3y46eUuzew9sGr6tgaaI2ZnkYQeYbOe8-c8oQLnTvjdwzAvHIoAjZTA3Oj/s1600/download.jpg" width="299" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Would the movie have benefited if it had gone into Oliver's head more and given us more insight into what drives him and what has given rise to his psychological makeup? I don't know if it would benefit from that, but it would change the nature of the movie. I read a piece somewhere describing <i>Saltburn</i> as "postmodern", a term that gets thrown around a lot but one which I don't think is off here. Emerald Fennell clearly knows that the audience will be familiar with this type of story from the start and populates the story with character types more than actual characters. Flatness (delivered with humor and wit) is part of the point. And the ending: did Oliver really do everything he did and go through everything he did just to be able to exult in the specific way he does in the final scene? He basically has a lewd NFL football style end zone celebration. That's it? That is what he takes from his victory? Compare that with <i>Brideshead</i> where Charles Ryder's entire experience leaves him changed in a major way, apparently even converted to Catholicism after starting the novel an agnostic. There is no theological aspect to <i>Saltburn</i>, needless to say, and no nostalgia for an earlier time or a hearkening back to a however mythological better age for the British nobility. <i>Saltburn</i> is resolutely of this age (though set mainly in 2006-2007), with nobody having what you might call heightened thoughts of any kind and everyone showing some combination of boredom, shallowness, acquisitiveness, and selfishness. You could say it's an empty film about empty people that says nothing startling or especially interesting about its milieu or the people in it, but despite that, I get the sense that Emerald Fennell made exactly the film she intended to make. She isn't trying to reach "deep". Her film isn't quite satire and definitely isn't a Highsmith-style psychological thriller, but as a black comedy of sorts, kind of ridiculous, very British in its sensibility, it works. At least it did for me.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-50042596577541943812024-02-03T04:00:00.005-05:002024-02-03T04:00:00.134-05:00When Reacher Did the Sherlock Holmes Thing, I Was Hooked <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrLnwu0icQlpEY_0mHCodhYO3daCOTxg2ClF11IgiVdDjQZjWxlM-EhOu8T6keJeJKtP_4yhMzLSgXuI8JXUa2fT5siuFPkQmjsXlUcJrDOI3UZmX2DImJ7yWSiRexF-gznM2zXpuCMYch3Oyvp70jgXzoZBpKIw4OmJPNi_Oww2EIj7wtZnvP_bZ4BOs/s326/Reacher_TV_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="220" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrLnwu0icQlpEY_0mHCodhYO3daCOTxg2ClF11IgiVdDjQZjWxlM-EhOu8T6keJeJKtP_4yhMzLSgXuI8JXUa2fT5siuFPkQmjsXlUcJrDOI3UZmX2DImJ7yWSiRexF-gznM2zXpuCMYch3Oyvp70jgXzoZBpKIw4OmJPNi_Oww2EIj7wtZnvP_bZ4BOs/w135-h200/Reacher_TV_poster.jpg" width="135" /></a></div><br />By<p></p><p>Scott D. Parker</p><p>It took a pair of podcast hosts and Sherlock Holmes to finally get me to watch Season 1 of Reacher. By the time I finished the first episode, I wondered why it had taken so long.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Setting the Hook</h3><p>Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin host the Fatman Beyond podcast and in the first episode of this year, Smith discusses Season 2 of Reacher. He was his usual ecstatic self when he loves something and that finally tipped the needle. Granted, when Bernardin mentioned it last year, that should have been my cue to watch because Bernardin is one of the brightest guys I listen to, and his understanding of story and structure is deep and I constantly learn when he talks.</p><p>So I tuned into episode 1 of Season 1 on Amazon Prime. All I knew about Reacher going in was a pretty short list. He was a drifter (a “hobo” as he says on the show); he was in the army but now wasn’t. He kills people. Lee Child wrote the books. And Tom Cruise played the character in two movies that I enjoyed.</p><p>Cut to an early segment in the TV show. After Reacher has been arrested and then released, he’s walking out of the police station, ready to get the hell out of dodge, when the lead detective, Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) makes a challenge to Reacher, our hulking hobo turns around and does the Sherlock Holmes thing. He says all the things he’s learned about Finley just by observation and deduction.</p><p>My reaction? A huge grin on my face. A guy who is super smart and can kick your ass? Sold!</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Plot</h3><p>As the last minute or so of any pilot episode does, the cliffhanger gives Reacher the situation where he chooses to remain in Margrave, Georgia, and help Finlay and patrol cop Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald) figure out what’s really going on in the small town. </p><p>I’m always a fan of stories where a seemingly small thing is actually just a single layer of a wider, larger plan by the bad guys and this season is certainly that. In fact, I actively kept processing the clues and how they relate as I watched each of the eight episodes. This was because I was curious how original author Child and the folks that adapted the first book, Killing Fields, into this season’s storyline into a coherent thread. </p><p>And there are multiple threads. It’s all well laid out and explained a few times but as I watched the show, a fact I know about Child’s writing process returned to my mind. Unless he changed, he writes every Reacher story without an outline. He just goes and trusts his creative mind to figure it all out. If that’s how he did it, more power to him.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Actor and the Character</h3><p>Alan Ritchson plays Reacher and he’s a giant. I think he mentioned he was six, five at least one time in the season. What I found fascinating was how Ritchson could, with barely changing his face, have Reacher go from kind to determined in a heartbeat. </p><p>His size is intimidating and I appreciated how he would give his opponents the chance to walk away. Few did, but all believed after the fight. Reacher moved with precision. It wasn’t necessarily graceful. It was quite brutal, but his fighting style was efficient. </p><p>There were a few times in which I saw how Ritchson played Reacher and I wondered if the character was somewhere on the spectrum. When a character asked Reacher what took him so long to meet up, Reacher was direct. “I killed five men.” Indeed, as I searched for the IMDB page to verify how to spell actors’ names, one of the top searched phrases was that very same thing. So I wasn’t the only one.</p><p>But I’ve come around to thinking that, no, Reacher isn’t autistic. He just takes no BS from anyone. The direct approach was his only approach. Why bother speaking extra words with the exact number will suffice. </p><p>I thoroughly enjoyed Season 1 of Reacher and will start Season 2 soon. What are your thoughts on Reacher?</p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-5450436409378820112024-01-27T04:00:00.006-05:002024-01-27T04:00:00.285-05:00You Would Never Know The Mysterious Affair at Styles Was a Debut Novel<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6o8YY0dFvoAQPsK9EX3lYqPIcneCg88rolBlzolsKnBQJLHuBuE_snf9r1lmSVr-q4tKsxcYnj6eqFy0hwMJNguT_rMZt6r0uwfeoTcBWhgIRbgBsR3F7rleQ-nFXCp8UKa3EfA7X0c6yEcHeYO9phq7UStPssUFLBq-SoTja6qxXz1UHbWHqVFQ3Qig/s452/Jacket_TheMysteriousAffairatStylesUS.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="300" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6o8YY0dFvoAQPsK9EX3lYqPIcneCg88rolBlzolsKnBQJLHuBuE_snf9r1lmSVr-q4tKsxcYnj6eqFy0hwMJNguT_rMZt6r0uwfeoTcBWhgIRbgBsR3F7rleQ-nFXCp8UKa3EfA7X0c6yEcHeYO9phq7UStPssUFLBq-SoTja6qxXz1UHbWHqVFQ3Qig/w133-h200/Jacket_TheMysteriousAffairatStylesUS.jpg.webp" width="133" /></a></div>by<p></p><p>Scott D. Parker</p><p>For the past four years, I’ve tried to read along with the reading plans hatched by the folks behind <a href="http://AgathaChristie.com">AgathaChristie.com</a>. Each year I’ve not completed all twelve books but I’m always game for a themed list like this that carries a reader throughout the year so I'm giving this year’s list a try. Unlike past lists that were, say, arranged by styles of murders, this year is simply chronological, and it begins at the beginning.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Time Period</h3><p>The Mysterious Affair at Styles is not only the first time we’re introduced to famed detective, Hercule Poirot, and his friend, Arthur Hastings, but it also is the first book Christie ever wrote. Talk about coming out of the gate at full speed. I’m still a freshman when it comes to Christie’s works—as best as I can tell, this is about the fourth or fifth book of hers I’ve read—but how she weaves this plot through the entire book is very impressive.</p><p>I’ve been doing some reading on Christie and I learned that Styles was written to win a bet. Christie’s sister didn’t believe the new writer could come up with a story where the reader cannot guess the actual culprit in the novel. Like many of the then-contemporary reviews stated in late 1920 and early 1921, the bet was won. </p><p>Christie started the novel in 1916, which is why the setting is still during wartime. We get a good sense of what it is like on the homefront, at least in terms of a large country manor. Hastings is on leave from the war and ends up at Styles manor to recuperate. Poirot is a part of a group of Belgian refugees living near Styles and he knew the rich owner, Emily Inglethorp. I particularly appreciated Poirot as a refugee and not some famous detective who has an office and solves crimes. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Plot</h3><p>Well, let’s be honest: the plot is wonderfully convoluted. As a listener (I heard the audiobook) in 2024, I was keen to see if I could figure out the killer, what threads were red herrings, and who had motive. Turns out I couldn’t, I kinda did, and everyone.</p><p>Much like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot keeps Hastings and other characters in the dark as the investigation progresses. There is always a legitimate reason why this happens (after Poirot explains it all) but it’s also Christie using her skill as a writer to tease just enough to entice readers to keep turning pages. </p><p>The murder in question is that of Emily Inglethorp. She is poisoned. Now the only question is who did it and why. </p><p>Christie tosses eight people in the mix. Alfred Inglethrop, the younger man recently married to Emily. John and Lawrence Cavendish, stepsons from Emily’s first marriage. Mary Cavendish, John’s wife. Evelyn Howard, a companion of Emily’s. Cynthia Murdoch, a friend of the family who works at a hospital dispensary. Dr. Bauerstein, a toxicologist who lives nearby. Dorcas, the loyal maid at Styles.</p><p>There are moments in the book where Christie (via Poirot) purposely keep things away from readers (and Hastings). To be honest, it reminded me of the middle section of The Hound of the Baskervilles where Holmes has Watson accompany Henry Baskerville to that manor while the detective does his own thing. Every writer is a reader and we absorb so many moments from other stories so things like this are bound to happen. </p><p>What this does, of course, is let Poirot have that final last chapter where he sums up everything, and it is immensely satisfying. While I don’t think Poirot is as smart as Holmes, there were still a few moments when I heard the explanation and I realized I should have caught a clue. Shrug. I’m too busy enjoying the story. </p><p>I borrowed my mom’s edition of the novel and it includes a different version of the final chapter. Christie originally had Poirot deliver the summation as part of a trial. Her editors encouraged her to change it up and just have Poirot relate all the details in the manor house. Much more effective because the Belgian detective can deliver all the clues with the flourish that reader have now enjoyed for over a century.</p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-35659929267730740922024-01-23T02:00:00.001-05:002024-01-23T02:00:00.144-05:00The Murdered Banker<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">I've been reading the Pushkin Vertigo issued mystery novels for several years now, and most recently among their books, I finished one of their reprints, an Italian mystery called <i>The Murdered Banker</i>, first published in 1935. It was the first mystery of the Milan-based Augusto De Angelis, credited now as being among the first Italian writers to publish successful mystery fiction in Italy. As the afterward in my edition says, "In 1929, when the Italian publisher Mondadori launched their popular series of crime and thriller titles (clad in the yellow jackets that would later give their name to the wider <i>giallo</i> tradition of Italian books and films), there were no Italian authors on the list. Many thought Italy was inherently infertile ground for the thriller genre, with one critic claiming that a detective novel set in such a sleepy Mediterranean country was an "absurd hypothesis." Augusto De Angelis strongly disagreed. He saw crime fiction as the natural product of his fraught and violent times: "The detective novel is the fruit--the red, bloodied fruit of our age."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">No surprise that he saw his surroundings as fraught and violent living in Italy under Mussolini. And the Fascist regime there had an ambivalent attitude toward the genre -- "on the one hand they approved of the triumph of the forces of order over degeneracy and chaos that most thriller plots involved; on the other hand they were wary of representations of their Italian homeland as anything less than a harmonious idyll." Among the populace, though, De Angelis' books were popular, and he went on to write 20 novels featuring his lead character, Inspector De Vincenzi.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLt8AD2D2KPK1dhjsNxMkq6T9nNNT6sN5Fa6nLB0NYnCJb7XY3SQAhnRJuP2xbF5TlRNmJw1M1rBICCvEF4I6XVbiezW5cSlyxcmybtTWcjwymqlAi-6HFcHpVTvZcFQTS7gMFcA70Z17F112FkyQq9irEcGIs1AZNLIthwr9jY1hAN2iVpOhyKrvBKBmC/s218/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="218" data-original-width="142" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLt8AD2D2KPK1dhjsNxMkq6T9nNNT6sN5Fa6nLB0NYnCJb7XY3SQAhnRJuP2xbF5TlRNmJw1M1rBICCvEF4I6XVbiezW5cSlyxcmybtTWcjwymqlAi-6HFcHpVTvZcFQTS7gMFcA70Z17F112FkyQq9irEcGIs1AZNLIthwr9jY1hAN2iVpOhyKrvBKBmC/s1600/download.jpg" width="142" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">De Angelis was a journalist as well as a novelist. I wonder what mystery fiction he read before he wrote <i>The Murdered Banker</i>. I would assume he'd read the English detective writers up to that point and the Americans working in the hardboiled style. But his character of Inspector De Vincenzi is neither a sleuth solving elaborate puzzles in the Golden Age fashion nor a Sam Spade or Continental Op private eye type. The closest analogue to De Vincenzi I see is Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, and I would assume De Angelis read some Maigret books because by 1935 Simenon had published a lot of them.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">In <i>The Murdered Banker</i>, De Vincenzi handles the case involving the killing of the title character, and he proceeds much like Maigret often does, using a combination of deductive logic and intuition. In the apartment where the murder occurred, he questions several people and sort of soaks up the atmosphere of the place, a policeman who is determined and unrelenting but also attuned to his own feelings and the feelings of others. He is also, obviously, a professional investigator and has to answer to pressures from above.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">The mystery is solid, and the book, about 160 pages, is all meat. There's nothing I could detect overtly political in the story, but I'm curious to read a couple more of his books to see if other ones do contain things that might have offended the Italian Fascists. His writing overall must have; at some point, he became a target they were watching. They censored his work. He wrote some anti-Fascist articles, and this got him arrested in 1943. He was released from prison three months later, but in 1944, a Fascist thug attacked him in the village of Bellagio, and the beating was so severe that he died from his injuries in the hospital. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-85253479749191838752024-01-20T04:00:00.002-05:002024-01-20T04:00:00.260-05:00Duane Swierczynski Talks Moving Backstory of New Novel in Return to Houston’s Murder by the Book<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXU8A9Gk7oqOhq3L3IiPAWdILkpOSXJK7b7pG7lMmKE705m-y34oGpmPI2MiQKZ1kbGhXMjXtWWj1oOk6yTx4qxTurfBIPNgFRLAjVUoTKvt02jnj8LuIuhXbZW8N-4Co9tUtz_YtmFaax2KPlVIgupUi88aCWiHQppI7vF-p819ADodDKWhJfjmUNvYU/s4032/Duane%20and%20McKenna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXU8A9Gk7oqOhq3L3IiPAWdILkpOSXJK7b7pG7lMmKE705m-y34oGpmPI2MiQKZ1kbGhXMjXtWWj1oOk6yTx4qxTurfBIPNgFRLAjVUoTKvt02jnj8LuIuhXbZW8N-4Co9tUtz_YtmFaax2KPlVIgupUi88aCWiHQppI7vF-p819ADodDKWhJfjmUNvYU/s320/Duane%20and%20McKenna.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>by<p></p><p>Scott D. Parker</p><p>It’s been nine years since Philadelphia native Duane Swierczynski had a book signing at Houston’s <a href="https://www.ocregister.com/2024/01/09/how-california-bear-author-duane-swierczynski-found-the-heart-of-his-crime-novel/">Murder by the Book</a>. In fact, as he told the folks who turned out last Friday night, this store was where he had his first book signing. What he appreciated, he told us, was how much the store had not changed. </p><p>He, on the other hand, has.</p><p>Swierczynski is the author of over a dozen novels, numerous short stories, and dozens of comics. He is married and is the father of two children. One, however, his daughter, Evelyn, was diagnosed with leukemia back in 2018. Swierczynski and his wife took turns spending the night in the hospital so Evie wouldn’t be alone. It was during these difficult times that the genesis of his new novel California Bear, began.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNaffgTqesX8rIEP5TWzbumY86J3qESrLasnyqvXSK7jjnDvdIj3jD9bqRJ2wPAtMLfQCsbcGfhbPmFZQAcY-tn5c0Y8zBcy2bhXzyyl5AQCRqdPNsL31hX4KAiGKxF5iR8nnPBcq_9OeUohIV3J1fn2N8QXSgBphTuDyKGEaTzuP8VlqFW7IinC3rHsQ/s400/bear.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="258" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNaffgTqesX8rIEP5TWzbumY86J3qESrLasnyqvXSK7jjnDvdIj3jD9bqRJ2wPAtMLfQCsbcGfhbPmFZQAcY-tn5c0Y8zBcy2bhXzyyl5AQCRqdPNsL31hX4KAiGKxF5iR8nnPBcq_9OeUohIV3J1fn2N8QXSgBphTuDyKGEaTzuP8VlqFW7IinC3rHsQ/s320/bear.jpeg" width="206" /></a></div>Back in 2016, the Swierczynski family moved to Los Angeles, but it was Duane and Evie who scouted out the city. Father and daughter discovered great places to eat and fun and famous places they had only read about. As Duane told the story at the store in an interview format by owner McKenna Jordan Duffey, Evie loved food, and they ended up doing a food tour of LA. Food ended up permeating California Bear.<p></p><p>In October 2018, Evie succumbed to her illness and Duane set California Bear aside. In <a href="https://www.ocregister.com/2024/01/09/how-california-bear-author-duane-swierczynski-found-the-heart-of-his-crime-novel/">another recent interview</a>, Duane stated “I thought, I’m not sure I can finish this.” He didn’t even pick it up for a long time. </p><p>But when he did, Evie channeled her voice into the prose. One of the characters in the new novel is Matilda, a fifteen-year-old who is diagnosed with leukemia. She’s determined to find out the truth about her dad: was he a murderer or was he innocent?</p><p>There’s also a true crime aspect to California Bear, something McKenna asked Duane about. He answered honestly. Too much attention is focused on the sensationality of these stories and too little on the fact that real people are involved. “It’s someone’s bad day,” Duane said. “The focus should be on the people, the human beings behind the headlines.”</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Working with James Patterson</h3><p>Speaking of attention, Duane commented on the battle for the attention spans of people and how much effort a potential reader has to bring to the act of reading “symbols on a page to see the movie in your mind.” When it comes to TV, movies, or anything streaming, viewers don’t have to do anything. They just sit there and the story washes over them. Readers, however, are co-authors with the writer, and that takes work. </p><p>One way to help people choose to be an active reader rather than a passive viewer is the pace of the prose, and there are few writers who write with such a propulsive pace as James Patterson. “He’s the hardest working guy in the business,” Duane said of Patterson, with whom he has collaborated a few times (including the wildly fun <a href="http://scottdennisparker.com/2023/08/25/lion-and-lamb-the-book-with-the-wittiest-banter-this-side-of-nick-and-nora/">Lion and Lamb from last year</a>). All the books that bear Patterson’s name pass through him.</p><p>Duane enjoyed working with Patterson, but he confessed that the small talk aspect of their relationship is vastly unequal. One time Patterson called up Duane and mentioned he was hanging out with Dolly Parton. Duane’s response was that he was walking his dog.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Proust Questionnaire</h3><p>McKenna ended the interview portion of the event with a few questions. Aside from the funnier ones (What’s an overrated virtue? “Chastity” and When do you lie? “I lie for a living”), it was Duane’s answer to “What do you most dislike?” that struck home for me. “Haters.” Empathy is important, Duane said. “You don’t know what people are going through.” Man, is that the truth.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Becoming Himself as a Writer Again</h3><p>McKenna asked Duane about his writing process and schedule. He confessed that after Evie, he needed to ramp up his writerly skills and used short stories to do just that. He mentioned that last year, he actually wrote a novel in longhand, just him, a pen, and the paper. But through all the comics and short stories and the “roulette wheel” of grief, Duane said that California Bear is proof that he’s “back to myself.” </p><p>I’m really looking forward to diving into Duane’s new novel, and I hope it won’t be another nine years before he returns to Houston.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Evelyn Swierczynski Foundation</h3><p>Evie was an avid reader and enjoyed the Literally Healing Program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles where every patient is given a new book everyday. Every Christmas season, Murder by the Book and other independent bookstores participate in a book drive to keep the hospital filled with books. But you don’t have to wait until the holiday season to contribute. Head on over to <a href="https://www.teameviefoundation.com">the foundation's website</a> to find out how you can help—including blood and bone marrow registry drive and the big goal of “Evie’s Bites”—and keep Evie’s spirit and Light bright.</p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-77753260259381151182024-01-18T13:56:00.001-05:002024-01-18T13:56:21.718-05:00Beau is back, baby<p style="text-align: center;"> <iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyDg2ypWx41XJlL7yqAQ4yUMbms2wlfJo-vE9Z4wHjflg1alQMIs_ZulgpHj5gU-utu3y8UvstzacvJKsVl7g' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Beau is back</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjs8o4pCsWdxnJ9BlwBoAVZiLkpkR6P5s4ewHYxcmqxZs_61tJ3epoBx1Gtoaxj9k9H1V7ospPKEuOcU3EgkKaQ35fpigF637DNhHaFfV1AbK6sJ-JVQd6Q8BlVmhu78TiGtxNMg468xxGbdBFPEoYDOIBq6ND1AIleBb6NfLXaQHkYKwTrVJztY95xGCE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjs8o4pCsWdxnJ9BlwBoAVZiLkpkR6P5s4ewHYxcmqxZs_61tJ3epoBx1Gtoaxj9k9H1V7ospPKEuOcU3EgkKaQ35fpigF637DNhHaFfV1AbK6sJ-JVQd6Q8BlVmhu78TiGtxNMg468xxGbdBFPEoYDOIBq6ND1AIleBb6NfLXaQHkYKwTrVJztY95xGCE" width="156" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-65158288378493297102024-01-13T04:00:00.012-05:002024-01-13T04:00:00.151-05:00Can Anyone Get Away With Murder? Eight Perfect Murders Provides An Answer<p><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7MF74xoQ6w3sxFut6WVO9unDAY6IVUUg9kHchg3860CTr3d5UUrC9FQehQCP7FidTFWFm2dIV7JobS-NaWnDR_Ouah91ZpczzYuHK4H0UXuTnjqU7zlspo6dEDS7aKL6pxliQVQqPvRq7UV2ZbBT5aZmbM4_jrpZC8qR_Ft2CZmQ3_dSg3ecbDlhv0lw/s1500/8.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="996" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7MF74xoQ6w3sxFut6WVO9unDAY6IVUUg9kHchg3860CTr3d5UUrC9FQehQCP7FidTFWFm2dIV7JobS-NaWnDR_Ouah91ZpczzYuHK4H0UXuTnjqU7zlspo6dEDS7aKL6pxliQVQqPvRq7UV2ZbBT5aZmbM4_jrpZC8qR_Ft2CZmQ3_dSg3ecbDlhv0lw/s320/8.jpeg" width="212" /></a></div>by<p></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Scott D. Parker</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The last book I read in 2023 was the Christmas novella, The Christmas Guest, by a new-to-me writer, </span><a href="https://www.peter-swanson.com" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peter Swanson</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I thoroughly enjoyed the holiday-themed story—and the twist—that I wanted to read another novel by the author. So the first book of 2024 I read was another Swanson book.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-6b755f1e-7fff-7328-d09e-07c665b03332"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But where to start? How about a novel featuring famous literary murders?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Eight Perfect Murders is Swanson’s sixth novel. It stars Malcolm Kershaw, the owner of a mystery bookstore in Boston. In first-person POV, Malcolm tells us the story of how an FBI agent, Gwen Mulvey, comes to ask Malcolm for his insight into a few murders that may or may not be connected. She thinks they are. Her bosses have other ideas. The connection, Gwen thinks, is that they are based on murders from books.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The eight literary murders in question comes from a blog entry Malcolm wrote years ago to promote the bookstore’s blog. The list is his take on “perfect” murders in novels. Here they are:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Red House Mystery (1922) by A.A. Milne</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Malice Aforethought (1931) by Anthony Berkeley Cox</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The A.B.C. Murder (1936) by Agatha Christie</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Double indemnity (1943) by James M. Cain</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strangers on a Train (1950) by Patricia Highsmith</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Drowner (1963) by John D. MacDonald</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deathtrap (1978) by Ira Levin</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Sidenote on Spoilers: I’ll be honest here and say that I’ve read none of these books and only seen the movie versions of Double Indemnity and Strangers on a Train. The plots of these books are discussed and revealed. I instantly had the idea that I should read all these books beforehand…but then realized I just didn’t care. I wanted to read this book here and now so, yeah, all eight books are spoiled. But I suspect a reader who has read all the books will get a kick out of it. Besides, a few of characters also say “I saw the movie, but I didn’t read the book.”)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gwen asks Malcolm how he came up with the list and here—and throughout the book—we get lots of discussion about these and other mystery books. For aficionados of the genre, it’s pretty fun. It’s book nerd stuff, and it made me wonder if Swanson really enjoyed talking about books like these and figured out a way to write a novel around it.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Malcolm gives her a few details, but keeps other things to himself. In fact, as the story goes on, the layers of Malcolm’s character are revealed…and it’s pretty darn cool.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Structure of the Book</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You know how the movie, “The Blair Witch Project,” was marketed as actual found footage? There’s a lot of that here. In fact, the opening dedication reads “A Memoir” followed by a disclaimer about the events being true. It got me just curious enough to flip back to the copyright page and verify that yes, this was a work of fiction.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With this being a first-person POV, everything is from Malcolm’s eyes, including some curious, almost fourth-wall breaking moments. One—and this is not a spoiler—has him making readers question what they’ve read, and he does this by pointing out the little nuances of the writing itself that might make you kick yourself for not catching them. It’s quite clever, and it changed how I experienced what Malcolm said and did.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Unveiling of Details</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Swanson performs some seriously good writing magic as this book goes on. He’ll introduce a person or a concept and give you some pieces of information where you form an opinion on said person or concept. Sometimes, it’s an off-hand reference, but you start to build a story around what you think about Malcolm and his world.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then Swanson lays down another literary card, and what you formed is flipped on its side. That’s fine because that’s what authors do. You take the new information and adjust your way of thinking. Only for Swanson to upend your expectations again. It’s devilishly clever, and I started to find myself hedging my bets on new characters or concepts.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Narration</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have to give a shoutout to Graham Halstead, the narrator of the audiobook. Just as Swanson changes how you perceive Malcolm, Halstead’s narration performs a similar feat. The way he narrates Malcolm in the beginning of the book changes as the chapters increase. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Reveal</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m certainly not going to give away the ending here—because I want you to read it—but it was nice to have things fully explained with no room for misunderstanding. The explanation was well earned.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Discovery of a New-to-Me Author</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When it comes to reading, it is so wonderful to discover a new-to-you author with other books already completed and waiting to be read. Two books into Peter Swanson’s bibliography and I’m eager to keep reading his books. With eight novels, I actually had the thought that I could get through all of Swanson’s books by the end of the year. Check back in December to see how it all turned out.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Have you read Swanson’s books? What are your favorites?</span></p></span>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-30619395417170244572024-01-09T08:11:00.002-05:002024-01-09T14:42:51.899-05:00Beginning of a Great Adventure<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span>It's not until fairly recently that I became aware of Percival Everett. Never mind that his first novel came out 40 years ago and that he's written over thirty books. Sometimes, somehow, you just don't come across a writer no matter how good that writer is. It was on some website a couple years ago that I happened across a piece on his novel <i>Erasure</i>, published in 2001, and the description of the book's plot so grabbed me that I kept it in my mind afterwards, and when I heard that a film adaptation of the novel was coming -- <i>American Fiction</i> -- I decided to read <i>Erasure</i> before seeing the film. I did both in the last month and was not disappointed in either. The book is a very funny look at race, stereotypes, the writing world, and a few other things, and it is also a sharp and poignant family drama. T</span><span>he film, with Jeffrey Wright as the main character, the novelist Thelonious Ellison, is an excellent adaptation. It's a film that is faithful to the book and that condenses some plot points from the novel well. It also, in one important character at least, adds a bit of nuance that is appropriate to a story taking place now, not twenty odd years ago. A success on all counts, in my view, as is the book. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span>After finishing it, the book, I mean, I had that pleasing feeling you get when you've read someone who to you is new and who you want to explore further. And in this case, as I said, there's much to explore, since Everett has been and continues to be prolific. What's better for a reader than that? You've found an author you didn't know about, like that person's writing a lot, and see that you have so much more of their stuff to choose from. And Everett is nothing if not protean. You look through his list of titles and the descriptions of what the novels are about and you see a startling level of variety: satires, western-set stories, plots involving crime, fictional biography, and narratives derived from Greek mythology, to name a few. There's much genre mixing and, clearly, a refusal to hew to conventional forms and reader expectations. My only dilemma after <i>Erasure</i> was where among all this to start. But after a visit to a bookstore and some browsing among his books on the shelf there, I chose <i>So Much Blue</i>, a novel of his from 2017.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-LCj7Lb7aBCMnxKzxlIXM0Vhyphenhyphenmv0i9_x2dselZ0aGyHdICM-zJMaG9eYymSB5tD1ItUsx_HL15MJLZ6-IhxFH-cJ6ko9JFprr2uKxxWHAQ5fItsNdfp-ZPLApE3JaeW_r0IBKnBnYbBji16xOLiRBrOXarIYUH4Vrl2DVYg676D1cfDCUB6o2IQaW7mjO/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-LCj7Lb7aBCMnxKzxlIXM0Vhyphenhyphenmv0i9_x2dselZ0aGyHdICM-zJMaG9eYymSB5tD1ItUsx_HL15MJLZ6-IhxFH-cJ6ko9JFprr2uKxxWHAQ5fItsNdfp-ZPLApE3JaeW_r0IBKnBnYbBji16xOLiRBrOXarIYUH4Vrl2DVYg676D1cfDCUB6o2IQaW7mjO/s1600/download.jpg" width="183" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><i>So Much Blue</i> follows its narrator, Kevin Pace, a married middle-aged painter with two children, through three timelines. One, "Home", concerns his doings more or less in the present and with his family; the second, "Paris", is set in the near past where Kevin had an affair, and the third, "1979", is about something he and his best friend experienced while in war-torn El Salvador many years ago. The three timelines alternate in a flawlessly told story centered around, in each unfolding strand, secrets. Secrets of various types that Kevin holds from those close to him, including, of course, his wife, You have a combination of a domestic novel, a tense and grimy novel of adventure and intrigue, and a tale of a somewhat world-weary and highly self-critical artist. All this, and at the book's center you have something you do not see, a painting that Kevin has been working on for years and refuses to show anybody, including his best friend and his wife. What we do know about the painting is that it has a lot of blue in it, but that's about it. He gives a few clues as to what it looks like, and we understand that his reasons for not showing the painting to anyone has to do with events he's gone through that have affected him strongly. In each of the three plot threads, suspense develops very well from the drama Kevin is involved in, and each unfolds with utter verisimilitude. This is a person's complex life you are involved in, and you are absorbed fully. There's a good deal of wry wit in the telling as well, even in its darkest moments. It's a read I thoroughly enjoyed, and on finishing the book, I said to myself that Percival Everett is now two for two for me. Two for two, and there's a rich assortment of choices from him to go to next. Again, what better for a reader than that, to make for yourself this kind of "discovery".</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As the saying goes, onward.</span></div><div style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div></span><div><br /></div><div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p></div>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-70837523693190531522024-01-06T04:00:00.010-05:002024-01-06T04:00:00.143-05:00My Favorite Books of 2023<p>by</p><p>Scott D. Parker</p><p>One of the things I did in 2023 that really helped me remember what I read was my notecard habit. For everything I watched or read, I wrote down my thoughts on a 4x6 lined index card along with the date. I particularly appreciated the finite space of an index card. Granted, sometimes I’d write a review for a blog and the notecard would be “See blog” but those times were rare. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Lots of Comics</h3><p>I ended up reading quite a bit in 2023. Now, one of the things that really helped bump up the total was my decision in the summer to read a comic book per day from Memorial Day to Labor Day. As a result, I read over 99 comics during the summer and then just kept going until the steak was broken on 11 November. It was so much fun to rediscover old issues I hadn’t read in decades and get introduced to new ones.</p><p>I particularly enjoyed the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle run on Batman from the early 1990s. I own nearly every title from that run so I had the great pleasure of opening my long boxes and fishing out issues that most likely hadn’t been opened since I taped them up back in my college days. Grant’s way of telling a story that drew on then-current issues like drugs and terrorism was a nice bridge between the Bronze Age version of the character and the grim/dark version we now have. Grant kept reminding the reader that Batman was really a man. Breyfogle’s art is superb, and not just his way to drawing characters and scenes but his imaginative way of laying out the panels. </p><p>A more modern comic title I really enjoyed was the current run on Nightwing by Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo. This pair remember something fundamental to the comic book medium: It’s supposed to be fun! They tell the story of the adult Dick Grayson from a point of view that basically makes you question why Bruce Wayne dresses up like a bat versus investing his money in other things that can help Gotham. And this title has heart. I was grinning the entire time I read these issues.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Favorite Books</h3><p>But I also read “real” books (as my wife calls them). I’m in a science fiction/fantasy book club (we’re in Year 15 now) and I don’t often finish the books I didn’t select, so I’m not going to include them in my best estimate of started-but-not-finished books (approximately 10). As best as I can tell, I finished 24 fiction books in 2023 (and two non-fiction books), which might be the most number of books I’ve read in many years. </p><p>DEAD SILENCE by S.A. Barnes - I gave this one an A in my book club. Think derelict “Titanic” space cruiser where salvagers have to enter the ship to retrieve things…but there might be something else on board. Super creepy, and the horror elements really worked for me.</p><p>THE NAZI CONSPIRACY by Brad Meltzer - All I need to know is that Meltzer wrote another history book. The fact that Scott Brick reads narrates is just gravy. There is an effortless quality to the prose and the narration about an alleged plot to kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at the Tehran Conference. Lots of great detail and it reads like a novel.</p><p>THE SPARE MAN by Mary Robinette Kowal - Five words sold me this book: “The Thin Man in Space.” Kowal narrates her own book that features two main protagonist that are more than worthy successors to Nick and Nora Charles.</p><p>FALLING by T.J. Newman - The cover is what snagged my attention, but the story of a pilot being blackmailed into crashing his plane kept my earbuds glued in my ears until it was over. Propulsive story that is suspenseful but not the breakneck pace of other thrillers. </p><p>CHARM CITY ROCKS by Matthew Norman - If I had to pick my favorite book of the year, this is it. I read it (not audio) over four days, and I haven’t done that since forever. Here’s the premise. </p><p>A single dad, Billy, is watching a rock and roll documentary with his high school senior son, Caleb, when the fictional band Burnt Flowers shows up. Billy confesses that he had a huge crush on the drummer, Margot Hammer, back in the day. With Caleb about to go off to college and with his mom married, he worries about his dad will be lonely when he moves away. When Caleb accidentally eats some “special” gummies, he sends an email to Margot who is a rock and roll recluse after a spectacular and public meltdown on stage two decades ago. Caleb invites Margot to come to Charm City Rocks, the record store in Baltimore over which his dad lives. He’s convinced that if the former rock star would just meet his dad, they’d hit it off.</p><p>But Caleb knows that Margot won’t just come down to Baltimore so he poses as if he’s a teenaged girl in an all-girl rock band. Margot’s publicist thinks it a great idea to get Margot’s name back out in the world and urges her to go. Reluctantly, she agrees, and then the truth hits the fan.</p><p>DROWNING by T.J. Newman - From the opening, harrowing moments of the first three chapters to the last 30 minutes of the audiobook, this book did not let up. In the book, a plane suffers mechanical failure two minutes after takeoff from Honolulu and crashes into the ocean. Unlike those famous airplane disaster movies from the 1970s that takes a quarter of the movie to introduce the characters and get the plane in the air, Newman puts you on the plane just after takeoff from the first sentence. By Chapter 3, the plane is down.</p><p>And those three chapters are incredibly harrowing and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful. How suspenseful you might ask? Suspenseful enough to elicit an emotional response. Heart pounding in the chest and a sting of tears in the eyes. And that was only the beginning.</p><p>PROJECT HAIL MARY by Andy Weir - The SF story of one man’s attempt to save all of humanity…as he works with an alien trying to save his planet. </p><p>LION AND LAMB by James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski - Yet another “Nick and Nora” type story with two utterly charming main characters. This book is so much fun. As I closed out my review: “When you find a book or characters that you instantly form a connection with, you just want more and more stories. As a writer, I know how long the process can take.</p><p>Which is why I’m requesting, on behalf of all the reading audience, that Patterson and Swierczynski write a new Lion and Lamb novel every year. Oh, and TV execs? Read this one. And then make the series. Call me. I’ve got some ideas on casting.</p><p>THE CHRISTMAS GUEST by Peter Swanson - I enjoyed reading seasonal books and this was the second Christmas book I read (after a re-read of THE CHRISTMAS THIEF by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark). I had never heard of Swanson but this novella was quite good. I really appreciated the twist at the end, and the ultimate reveal. How much did I like it? The first book of 2024 I read was a Swanson book…but that’s a different post.</p><p>On the non-fiction side, my favorite was BE USEFUL by Arnold Schwarzenegger. His story, his rise from humble beginnings to what he became is a good one, and this slim volume boils down his philosophy down to seven things. Oh, and Arnold reads the audiobook so that’s a win-win.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, those are my selections. What are some of your favorite books of 2023? And what are you looking forward to in 2024?</p><div><br /></div>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-2640420414253530852024-01-02T06:35:00.002-05:002024-01-02T07:24:42.138-05:00Bunny hugs and eBay orders: The Steve Weddle Interview<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">By <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00HNZ8P84" target="_blank">Eryk Pruitt</a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">When naming giants in the canon of rural/Southern crime fiction from the 21<sup>st</sup> century will inevitably name Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and of course Steve Weddle, who, in 2013, published his debut novel-in-stories, <i><a href="https://countryhardball.com/country-hardball-2/" target="_blank">Country Hardball</a>. </i>That masterpiece is often named as an influence to the next generation of authors who write rural settings, namely Jedidiah Ayres, SA Cosby, and myself. </span> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For ten long years, Weddle fans have waited for his follow-up novel. Often we’ve had to make due with a short fiction piece, such as the one published in <i>Playboy</i> in 2015, or by squinting at the Instagram posts he’d teased out while handwriting—<i>handwriting</i>—his next opus. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is over. Amazon Reads customers can download <a href="https://www.amazon.com/County-Line-novel-Steve-Weddle-ebook/dp/B0BZT83MKD/" target="_blank">THE COUNTY LINE</a> right now and through the month of January. Folks who want the physical book in their hands will have to wait until February 1, but after the long ten years, what’s another four weeks? At any rate, Weddle returns to form with his latest, <i>The County Line</i>, and I’d argue he’s outdone himself. This new one takes us back to the early days of the 20<sup>th</sup> century where—<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You know what: None of y’all are here to listen to me jabber. How about we have the man himself talk about THE COUNTY LINE?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzouZlz46A_psql_MKR5tGucoVDgFgdkiXdwZ9p_-T9lpMhS5gYGNfP_mq9HBlbvijlFYojENBysAiuje5uu2yTfOl8HlX0WwA5gXCydCnUE0uR_Zc18Oki6ICEbmIrjcSfggpznS9zoN0LQ24cxoZOmDYW0WpyX7353R8nUahy5pTkqNLyn8Itp-KKR4/s1000/815JRmk3nCL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="667" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzouZlz46A_psql_MKR5tGucoVDgFgdkiXdwZ9p_-T9lpMhS5gYGNfP_mq9HBlbvijlFYojENBysAiuje5uu2yTfOl8HlX0WwA5gXCydCnUE0uR_Zc18Oki6ICEbmIrjcSfggpznS9zoN0LQ24cxoZOmDYW0WpyX7353R8nUahy5pTkqNLyn8Itp-KKR4/s320/815JRmk3nCL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="213" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">ERYK PRUITT:As you know, I am a big COUNTRY HARDBALL fan, so I could hardly wait for THE COUNTY LINE. What were the seeds to this story? </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">STEVE WEDDLE: COUNTRY HARDBALL was populated with the Tomlins and Rudds and Pribbles of Columbia County, Arkansas. While the stories in that 2013 collection were set in that time, I was curious how those families had gotten there. That book ends with Roy Alison, whose kinfolks are Tomlins, working to find out what had happened to his grandfather, who may have been killed by Franklin Rudd back in the 1950s. I’d thought about having Roy Alison track down Franklin Rudd, who told him about what had happened in the 1950s, but Rudd had to carry the story back to the 1930s for some context. I had this David Mitchell CLOUD ATLAS thing all planned out. Well, when Playboy came calling after COUNTRY HARDBALL published and asked for a short story, I peeled off the 1950s portion of that, which left me walking around in the 1930s, a period that has fascinated me because of outlaw camps and prohibition and the Great Depression and early jazz and so much more.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">EP: Your sense of place in THE COUNTY LINE is absolutely amazing. You drew us into this world and locked us in. What inspired you to write about that part of the world?</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: I grew up in that region, and it’s pretty tough to get all that dirt out from under your fingernails, if you ever wanted to do so. As I’m sure you know, whether it’s east Texas or North Carolina or my own little corner of Arkansas, once you start digging around in the lives of these characters, pretend people or not, they get their hooks in you. I’ll read family histories and diaries and yearbooks from that time period or read a newspaper article about a pharmacy celebrating five decades and I’ll get to wondering. You let the movie play in your head and just walk around inside of it. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">EP: You had a keen attention to detail in THE COUNTY LINE. There were so many random bits which kept us immersed in the time and culture of Depression-era Arkansas/Louisiana. From famous criminals to blues singers to sports interests and even a <a href="https://propercocktails.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/the-bunny-hug-cocktail/" target="_blank">Bunny Hug cocktail</a>. I could probably pick your brain for hours about research, so how did you go about researching the culture back then? How did you choose what to keep and what to leave out?</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: Had I known before I started what it was going to take to pull this off, I’d have bought stock in eBay. I’ve ordered so many out-of-print books and farmers’ magazines and catalogs that I’ve had to clear out a closet upstairs for everything. Leaving any of that out of the story was tough, because I’d read an article about local banker and I’d see so much detail I wanted to use, from his cufflinks to the way he sat in his car. Editing this story down, keeping it as tight as I could, that was tough. There’s just so much great material.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>EP: </i><i>One of my favorite aspects of the book is the rich, tongue-in-cheek dialogue. It was very comparable to what I might read in books by William Gay, Daniel Woodrell, or Chris Offutt. Even the dumbest of characters you write speak in such a way that renders them smarter than the reader. How did you hone your dialogue in such a way?</i> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: If you watch a movie that came out this year, you get a sense of how people talk, but just a sense. Same with movies from the 1930s, I think. Go back to, say, <i>Gold Diggers of 1933</i></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">. Most of us know the song, “We’re in the Money,” but not the movie. The way people talked on stage then was probably further from the way real people talked than the gulf between movie talk and real talk today. My sense is that today, filmmakers want their movies to sound more realistic, except Wes Anderson, of course. So I couldn’t rely on movies of that time, though that’s the first thing that comes to mind, because we have people from 1933 saying words and we can see and hear them. Ah, the magic of talkies. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">So for me, I read through diaries and newspaper articles and out-of-print novels and letters. Reading collections of letters is great because people sound different based on their recipient, so you get a variation of flavor even from the same writer. And I looked online for “slang from 1930s” and so forth, most of which I discounted because it just sounded too phony, though there were a few keepers.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once I had the characters well formed, I got a sense of which of them would be saying which phrases, because not every outlaw sounded like James Cagney. I’d see a phrase or a rhythm of dialogue and know pretty quickly whose mouth that belonged in, you know? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>EP: There were ten long years between COUNTRY HARDBALL and THE COUNTY LINE. What was that journey like? Please tell me it won't be ten more years until the next one....</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">EP: You have teased in casual conversation that you will be revisiting this world in the future, namely with more Cottonmouth Tomlin. The ending (which absolutely stuck the landing BTW) certainly leaves it open for more trips to town. Can you share any information on that?</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: THE COUNTY LINE mentions Cottonmouth’s time running guns and working for Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray in Honduras. The next book, as it stands, features a friend of Cottonmouth’s from that time coming to Arkansas and following the trail of the Knights of the Golden Circle. In researching Honduras for THE COUNTY LINE, I kept running across stories of mercenary Lee Christmas, and I need to get a version of him into a book soon so I can write off some of these eBay purchases. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">EP: Can you share a little of the process of bringing this book alive? Do you write every day? I saw several Instagram posts back in the day of pages written by hand. How much do you write by hand and how much did it change over the time it took to write it?</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: I’m up pretty much every day around 4 a.m. to write. Some days it’s editing or reading or researching, but the goal is to write. I tend to draft by hand in a hardback notebook. The right-hand side is for the draft, and the left-hand side is for notes. I find that as I’m writing, I’ll think of plot points or character development I want to add in later, so I’ll jot a note to the left. Or I’ll drop in some research notes there on the left. For me, a solid day is filling a page of the 5 x 8.25 notebook, which is usually a couple hundred words or more.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Later, when the pages have been typed in Scrivener, I’ll be able to pop back and forth between scenes and can do a hundred words or a thousand words in a day. I write scenes, not chapters, so it’s usually still a little messy until I get to the point that I’m ready for someone else to read it. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">EP: This is your first book with Lake Union publishing. How was the experience working with them? </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: In addition to being thoughtful and organized, they’ve really helped carve this book into shape. They’re engaged in the book, sure, but they’re so astute in terms of getting the book into the hands of readers.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">EP: What are you hoping most that readers will take away from the book?</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">SW: I was listening to an interview David Remnick conducted a few months back with Salman Rushdie, and Rushdie said that the purpose of a novel is to bring joy to the reader. That seems a very straightforward way of thinking about it. Sure, I want folks to be engaged with the characters, to roll around in the scenery, to be on the edge of their seats for the plot twists. But, you know, I really want the reader to come away from the book having experienced joy in the reading. Life is tough. Enjoy yourself, why don’t you? </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">***</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/County-Line-novel-Steve-Weddle-ebook/dp/B0BZT83MKD/" target="_blank">The County Line is now available</a> as an Amazon First Reads selection for January </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">and will be published on Feb. 1, 2024.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">***</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOLcaVj2CpvNySRcOLXTRbQx8VpiaolNVw3gHGkVHPzheZes19tbdeKSN_ewHEkw_oSlnTB1FRjezIQMAZdOYeQUfxOZgrcTWCK0eYTzmjgAATrjo4W6oYrGXY3yejnsvoWoXC227TP5OFcTt9UUcDRfR4f3PDvQXXWxNHVI4loc7XBEJu6a3WqbgwCyM/s848/IMG_0168.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="848" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOLcaVj2CpvNySRcOLXTRbQx8VpiaolNVw3gHGkVHPzheZes19tbdeKSN_ewHEkw_oSlnTB1FRjezIQMAZdOYeQUfxOZgrcTWCK0eYTzmjgAATrjo4W6oYrGXY3yejnsvoWoXC227TP5OFcTt9UUcDRfR4f3PDvQXXWxNHVI4loc7XBEJu6a3WqbgwCyM/s320/IMG_0168.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">THE COUNTY LINE, in an early, hand-written draft.</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">***</span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“At once wry, thrilling, and full of heart, </span><span class="a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The County Line</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> evokes the Coen brothers at their period best, while staking out a voice and milieu all its own.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—Chris Holm, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Child Zero </span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“A book both wistful for the past but also brutally honest about it. Steve Weddle has crafted a bluegrass hymn with the notes written in blood.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—S.A. Cosby, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">All the Sinners Bleed </span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“It’s like Faulkner had a love child with a couple of Elmore Leonard’s 1930s-set novels.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—Nick Kolakowski, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Boise Longpig Hunting Club</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“A slide into the American Abyss from one of our best fiction writers. Steve Weddle’s spectacular novel dramatizes how, in this country, all that glitters is only a gleam away from all that guilt.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">— Aaron Gwyn, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">All God’s Children</span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"> and </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Wynne’s War</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“</span><span class="a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The County Line</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> is downright biblical. In his latest novel, Steve Weddle follows his truly unforgettable protagonist, Cottonmouth Tomlin, on a lyrical journey through Great-Depression-era Arkansas. As an Arkansawyer who’s often struggled to reconcile my place in this world—this book hit home.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—Eli Cranor, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Ozark Dogs</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“This is the book I have been waiting for and it does not disappoint. Every word in every sentence on every page is jam-packed with pure TNT. Steve Weddle delivers cracking dialogue, tense action, and most of all: heart, to transport us to another time and place that you won’t want to leave. A perfect addition to the canon of Southern literature.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—Eryk Pruitt, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Something Bad Wrong</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“With wit sharp as viper fangs and characters whose pulses vibrate on each page, </span><span class="a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">The County Line</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> is hilarious, tragic, thought-provoking, and relentlessly entertaining. Even the dust rising off dirt roads to drift between cypress limbs is vivid enough to pierce the veil between 1933 and now. This is a storytelling feat.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—Chris Harding Thornton, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Pickard County Atlas</span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"> and </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Little Underworld</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; margin: -4px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“I was lucky enough to get an early look at what is certain to be one of my favorite books of 2024. Cottonmouth Tomlin returns from running guns in Honduras to run the Arkansas outlaw camp left to him by his uncle. The camp is a safe place for criminals to lay low as long as their misdeeds take place over the county line. Cottonmouth has bigger plans, though author Steve Weddle keeps you guessing as to whether he has the brainpower to pull them off. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy and Elmore Leonard in this drily witty tale, but Weddle’s colorful characters and savory dialogue are all his own. A hugely enjoyable read that builds to a tremendously satisfying conclusion.” </span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">—Scott Von Doviak, author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Lowdown Road</span></span></p>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11924642896142479842noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-28151044963092679042023-12-24T06:00:00.001-05:002023-12-24T06:00:00.152-05:00My Christmas 2023 Playlist <p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV1VXOVyD9lKvxNqj2e6m9fcYRFxUmcUfNT-reWrfK18dX92XaqLqvPEjcTa66lg8r2mNVQXBUKhD_8s_MOlJGtEQe-zd6l6K5PNbRINowLjs7ur0mR2WQ7JdzgiH1aedn0begh_wT5bBw7e4nJ2Ysu8kBr81AcReCS1oOZH1jdj6AwoBrCpECQnbEYxw/s425/2023-12-23%20jd%20mcpherson%20album.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="425" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV1VXOVyD9lKvxNqj2e6m9fcYRFxUmcUfNT-reWrfK18dX92XaqLqvPEjcTa66lg8r2mNVQXBUKhD_8s_MOlJGtEQe-zd6l6K5PNbRINowLjs7ur0mR2WQ7JdzgiH1aedn0begh_wT5bBw7e4nJ2Ysu8kBr81AcReCS1oOZH1jdj6AwoBrCpECQnbEYxw/s320/2023-12-23%20jd%20mcpherson%20album.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Accurate depiction of my children every year. "*!#&* socks again."<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">By <a href="http://www.clairebooth.com" target="_blank">Claire Booth</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It’s time for my annual Christmas music list, and once again there’s
no rhyme or reason to my picks. The last year I did this, readers responded
with some of their own favorites, which have made their way onto my own list. Here
are a few: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ7W1vHavO0sjaykLHjqAYDKvwDKcwVBeIu4-MajPpfZcY7CeOVPXAXPTAS56d_UkwQYGODdHbZa4iamUUS0PMonE2Pzm6ccJW4ujSMIXnYYIFHsv7ZViZI7R-v5-g_adkixVWpqz6wc4CTVPuCZCr-tw1eipoqavVCveNeq3LhiqL7_g-GQdwqX9VkYU/s443/2023-12-24%20samara%20joy%20album%20cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="443" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ7W1vHavO0sjaykLHjqAYDKvwDKcwVBeIu4-MajPpfZcY7CeOVPXAXPTAS56d_UkwQYGODdHbZa4iamUUS0PMonE2Pzm6ccJW4ujSMIXnYYIFHsv7ZViZI7R-v5-g_adkixVWpqz6wc4CTVPuCZCr-tw1eipoqavVCveNeq3LhiqL7_g-GQdwqX9VkYU/s320/2023-12-24%20samara%20joy%20album%20cover.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A truly lovely album.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Hey, Skinny Santa” J.D. McPherson, recommended by Eric Cartner.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“She Won’t Be Home (Lonely Christmas)” Erasure, recommended by
Marcus Donner.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A wonderful take on “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” by Los
Straitjackets, recommended by Andrew Blasko.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Santa’s Got a Dirty Job” Rich & Rowe, recommended by Rosanne
Urban. And if you want even more irreverence, I like “Christmas Dirtbag,” a
Wheatus re-take of their classic “Teenage Dirtbag.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Hallelujah,” specifically the version by k.d. lang, recommended
by Grace Koshida.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“River” was recommended multiple times, specifically the version
by Jim Cuddy and of course, the original version by Joni Mitchell herself
(recommended by Danna Wilberg and Grace Koshida).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And now for my list. These songs aren’t necessarily new, but they’re
either new to me or ones that have re-entered my rotation this year. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWCHSxz1vKI" target="_blank">What’s that Sound?</a>” J.D. McPherson</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “Rock the Christmas Cheer” The Bongos</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “I Want an Alien for Christmas This Year” Fountains of Wayne</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “Christmas Time” Rogue Wave</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “The Christmas Song” The Raveonettes</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “This Christmas,” Donny Hathaway</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTx5O6pRmI" target="_blank">Reindeer</a>,</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">”</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> Jon Pardi. The best song off his new Christmas album. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Holiday Mood” The Apples in stereo</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “Christmas Wish,” Gregory Porter</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY7KI1qcmZo" target="_blank">Twinkle Twinkle Little Me</a>,” Samara Joy</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> “My Heart and Soul (I Need You Home for Christmas),” Suzi
Quatro<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic-SgnrhoRq3CqCk-d522o_ZWyh-vgdE9zTTkIG99i8y7DC85jTHblFXOXcyqSbLivJ2J_JC4f_M97ygSy6cP3wQ2TMQnxyD-TauzbEhYDHYtZyIplsnRGoYEDaqBv3rkA4mkCJTurCs7hr9gObx4SCxvE6-DRAF9yiajqzYQtGrmO4EGo584KVL5SZzI/s843/2023-12-23%20bongos,%20rock%20the%20christmas%20cheer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="843" data-original-width="843" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic-SgnrhoRq3CqCk-d522o_ZWyh-vgdE9zTTkIG99i8y7DC85jTHblFXOXcyqSbLivJ2J_JC4f_M97ygSy6cP3wQ2TMQnxyD-TauzbEhYDHYtZyIplsnRGoYEDaqBv3rkA4mkCJTurCs7hr9gObx4SCxvE6-DRAF9yiajqzYQtGrmO4EGo584KVL5SZzI/w320-h320/2023-12-23%20bongos,%20rock%20the%20christmas%20cheer.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A new song from The Bongos. A Christmas miracle!<br /></td></tr></tbody></table></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> And if you’re just not feeling it this year: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Another Lonely Christmas,” Prince</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Is It New Year’s Yet?” Sabrina Carpenter</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And to readers near and far, have a wonderful holiday season, and as always, thanks for reading. - Claire<br /></span></i></p>
<p> </p>Claire Boothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10722316004740631656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-41009138799201128572023-12-19T02:00:00.001-05:002023-12-19T02:00:00.135-05:00Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Well, here we are once again, holiday season, which includes Christmas season, and among other things, it's a time, if you're so inclined, to watch your famous Christmas movies. Films with a Christmas season connection of whatever type and genre. Apropos of that, I thought it would not be out of line to mention a Christmas film favorite of mine, even though it's a film I've written about before. That piece was for the unfortunately defunct blog that Jed Ayres, film maven extraordinaire, used to administer, called Hardboiled Wonderland, and I thought I would repost the piece here, because it's a film that still somehow seems a bit under the radar when it comes to Christmas films. I'm talking about Abel Ferrara's <i>'R Xmas</i>, from 2001, a film that's not all that easy to find but well-worth seeking out. It's a small gem of an unconventional Christmas film, with crime involved of course, and anyway...here's the piece:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh6xKPT9QkiLj2DW43a43vYOSJRD0dcvpyqd8uzGMHnHntE7hGS9Sv-Kri0l1XpeduVmA5gE65--_GqIW2LygIk-TWldkhs3NttJQGXIOz43zr65vpo8SJGbOmYMy0PmQciOjhhHixQ0NN3Q3pDezSUOOT4LJ_BnDzAd9kgdvyM3tbMI1CrjrZaoIe4T1fW" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="320" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh6xKPT9QkiLj2DW43a43vYOSJRD0dcvpyqd8uzGMHnHntE7hGS9Sv-Kri0l1XpeduVmA5gE65--_GqIW2LygIk-TWldkhs3NttJQGXIOz43zr65vpo8SJGbOmYMy0PmQciOjhhHixQ0NN3Q3pDezSUOOT4LJ_BnDzAd9kgdvyM3tbMI1CrjrZaoIe4T1fW" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br />Few movies
integrate a crime plot and a Christmas story as well or as completely as Abel
Ferrara’s <i>‘R Xmas</i>. And it’s Christmas in a very specific time and
place, as a pre-credit scroll tells us: “In December of 1993 the Honorable
David Dinkins was completing his first and only term as Mayor of New York.” I’m not sure how much these words mean to
somebody not from New York City, but for those who lived in New York through
the Dinkins years, from 1990-1993, it has a clear connotation. New York City was at a low point, with both
crime and economic struggle high.</span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Even if you’re not
from New York, you sense from the words that the city could not have been
thriving. If it had been, wouldn’t the mayor have been elected to a second
term?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi5HXsYLOtKPF4_ZsJjYnu7-H2JMBW8vosgtCGTOen9nvaNRYBcPI11RgxEHW7c_JQcj1hu8sevONJjSCyf-GMkSlUhex-DqvjK3LUTYIiXunsWcFaGWWon-_4TrN7fquMLzPGmd27YaN-XmkRcpaGtvdezxEJ3beZRGY2LtuSGwsv3BMnQWT6XkAkU5GTI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="169" data-original-width="298" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi5HXsYLOtKPF4_ZsJjYnu7-H2JMBW8vosgtCGTOen9nvaNRYBcPI11RgxEHW7c_JQcj1hu8sevONJjSCyf-GMkSlUhex-DqvjK3LUTYIiXunsWcFaGWWon-_4TrN7fquMLzPGmd27YaN-XmkRcpaGtvdezxEJ3beZRGY2LtuSGwsv3BMnQWT6XkAkU5GTI" width="320" /></a></span></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The movie opens with what’s clearly
a scene from a Christmas past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Little
children wearing adult costumes, we soon realize, are performing a theatrical
version of <i>A Christmas Carol</i> for an elementary school production during
the holiday season, and in the auditorium watching are all the parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The school looks like one with resources; the
parents, nearly all-white, are well-dressed and apparently affluent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One father (Lillo Brancato) has his camcorder
trained at his daughter, who has a lead role, and we’ll follow this father as
he leaves the school with his daughter and wife (Drea de Matteo) after the
play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The daughter has brown skin, and
the family speak Spanish together as well as English, since they are, we
realize, Latinx.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On a horse and buggy
ride downtown, as they proceed down Museum Mile on 5<sup>th</sup> Avenue in
Manhattan, the mother asks her daughter what museum they are passing – the
Guggenheim Museum – and they have a humorous back and forth about how to
pronounce the word “Guggenheim”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
parents seem like they are intent on educating their child well, with culture,
but their manner and down to earth way of talking mark them as grounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They take their daughter to a department
store Santa – how much more typical a Christmas thing could you do – and while
at the store, the father does all he can to acquire for their girl a Party Girl
doll, the must-have toy that year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
fails at the store when another woman grabs the last doll off the shelf just before
he reaches it (and he gets to watch the fortunate woman nearly come to blows
with another woman who puts her hands on the doll), but that doesn’t mean he
and his wife will give up their pursuit for that gift.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiMU33rDkXVSPWGHmoIWm8XgRW5cISF_RsvBdhL6GTfO8-53CI08XFnVynNEd2ASiosiweKVlqqdBGXcj0eu4GNzX8nZacho0iUIlLd4FafXF8gFRApKnsLqj1XwcnlSzWleHjY_rMfOxPL2iBW2FBaQEBJjFx9MknreSgAZzOdb-9c7OtRTZXEC4yOH5iC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="185" data-original-width="320" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiMU33rDkXVSPWGHmoIWm8XgRW5cISF_RsvBdhL6GTfO8-53CI08XFnVynNEd2ASiosiweKVlqqdBGXcj0eu4GNzX8nZacho0iUIlLd4FafXF8gFRApKnsLqj1XwcnlSzWleHjY_rMfOxPL2iBW2FBaQEBJjFx9MknreSgAZzOdb-9c7OtRTZXEC4yOH5iC" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So far, so good. Later that evening, grandma comes over to
watch their girl, and the mother and father go out. Good Manhattanites in a fancy building, they have
little red Christmas envelopes of cash for their doorman and for the guy out
front who has brought their car around from the garage. Only after they take a long ride in this car,
going past Yankee Stadium and up to what appears to be Washington Heights
(northern Manhattan) or the Bronx and then walk into another apartment they
have in a decidedly unglamorous apartment building do we see how they make
their money, as serious, calm, disciplined drug dealers. The father heads a crew that labels its
cocaine bags “TKO”, and that coke is sold by their associates/employees on the
street. What began as a film that showed
us a nostalgic view of a non-commercialized Christmas, with kids in all the
parts, has turned into a movie about commercialism in different forms, both the
crass commerce of Christmas and the viciousness that can breed (the two women
fighting over the party doll) and the just as blunt and even more dangerous
commerce that comes with drug dealing. </div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjHkAKRfE_uhQl5pKyEIfUPZZFNmrMhI0XMw1dVi3dADSKG7Uz4AqWpwk1q1LNWW6QqprzC1hI2dnxbhwVKnDJxn2Y0WXPyc7LY_HGvvuRDNPqIgKrZ2lUGbra5GxB3dQy1isvkMzqe5Ljk260b9-St58DcY2yiiZgSaAVt1JNeAULxJfmQGWGQRyVkU_Au" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="176" data-original-width="320" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjHkAKRfE_uhQl5pKyEIfUPZZFNmrMhI0XMw1dVi3dADSKG7Uz4AqWpwk1q1LNWW6QqprzC1hI2dnxbhwVKnDJxn2Y0WXPyc7LY_HGvvuRDNPqIgKrZ2lUGbra5GxB3dQy1isvkMzqe5Ljk260b9-St58DcY2yiiZgSaAVt1JNeAULxJfmQGWGQRyVkU_Au" width="320" /></a></div></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><i>‘R Xmas</i> is Abel Ferrara
working in top form, quietly subversive. The mother and father’s drug dealing
is viewed with the matter-of-factness you’d give to any job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s somewhat mundane, takes focus, and comes
with aggravations and anxieties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it
allows them to live the life they want to lead in a very expensive city. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can support family members, and most of
all make a good life for their daughter. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the mother says at one point, without a
hint of snobbery but with a sincerity you can’t but feel for when you think of
the state of many public schools, she doesn’t want to take their daughter out
of private school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their daughter is clearly the apple of both
their eyes, and on Christmas Eve, unwilling to let the holiday pass without
getting that Party Girl doll for their daughter, they make a trip to an outer
borough to get the doll from a guy who sells them on the black market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the mother is at the guy’s warehouse
getting the toy, her husband leaves the car to take care of some unnamed
business, and it’s here that we learn there are other forces watching them who
have their own nasty holiday agenda.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That agenda entails extortion, or what you might call forcing “gifts”
from them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tis the season for taking as
much as it is the season for giving.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhXWHX0Vsr1uRfOWV7TgJ2jxtz5lCz81XPFw33r25DSMWSvqphOPhgWyXcuAazEf-gN-7X_jlKub3f5FmvfmqGBXiZaTGfCpW2IdZ2xJHrhA8GR4_Zu-zjFriv05diCV9nmoNklqvr048aHaCnoayL_VnQGvcLhG0hVxdUm1OpzfzV3YcSKG-GAjB1pBR4f" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="320" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhXWHX0Vsr1uRfOWV7TgJ2jxtz5lCz81XPFw33r25DSMWSvqphOPhgWyXcuAazEf-gN-7X_jlKub3f5FmvfmqGBXiZaTGfCpW2IdZ2xJHrhA8GR4_Zu-zjFriv05diCV9nmoNklqvr048aHaCnoayL_VnQGvcLhG0hVxdUm1OpzfzV3YcSKG-GAjB1pBR4f" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Christmas songs and Christmas
imagery – trees, lights, crosses, decorations – permeate <i>‘R Xmas</i>. The soundtrack, done by Schooly D, twists
seasonal songs like “Silent Night” into menacing background music. The urgency behind the parents getting the
Party Doll to their daughter and the mother getting the demanded money to the
weird extortionist (Ice-T) are almost, if not quite, the same. And is the daughter any different than most young
children who just hope to get what they wish for on Christmas? She’s oblivious to the difficulties her
parents endure on the job just as another child would be of a parent in a more
conventional, but still stress-inducing, profession. On Christmas morning, unwrapping her gifts,
the girl says, “This is the best Christmas ever”. She means it, and for her it’s true, but it’s
a line that contains an irony she couldn’t begin to fathom.</span></div></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitoCbA0512siVu-a2xu2ffg-YhtDVrHgvsF4iZhXzAdnkOXWJE8uhUp1O2uhrsZOH6dvYOblTyJmQN8iQMEIe582BgVNMazQuy_COFbhuH7C3emUiYrfjq4RnkKX_B4gpY-5tjhTyaMZlgOhIDpbgpBCUuS-EOzCLgw8UAY7RSs7_Hx5CbTxTHNWxGdU0J" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="320" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitoCbA0512siVu-a2xu2ffg-YhtDVrHgvsF4iZhXzAdnkOXWJE8uhUp1O2uhrsZOH6dvYOblTyJmQN8iQMEIe582BgVNMazQuy_COFbhuH7C3emUiYrfjq4RnkKX_B4gpY-5tjhTyaMZlgOhIDpbgpBCUuS-EOzCLgw8UAY7RSs7_Hx5CbTxTHNWxGdU0J" width="320" /></a></div><br />At 85 minutes, <i>‘R Xmas</i> is a
fast, easy watch. But there’s a lot
going on in that short running time. Everyone
gives committed performances – Drea de Matteo, in particular, shines – and Abel
Ferrara directs with his usual rigor.
Has the man ever made a sloppy film?
I don’t think so. Some of his movies
work better than others, but Ferrara is never slack. You’ll find Christmas films more famous than
this one, more celebrated and on a larger scale, but <i>‘R Xmas</i> ranks among
the most trenchant. </div>
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><br /><p></p></div>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-24306548798122086802023-12-16T02:00:00.003-05:002023-12-16T02:00:00.142-05:00 It's a Good Thing the Crooks Are Not Very Smart in The Christmas Thief<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5SzfUnxj6-ZylHHX26qH-e57kTa2J7rVjglfefLyYVVy3IHVwf4JmSYLkmLH1osNa0CGubslvLvej6nRxL8Qvg0HjtHrYleVSbiAtl3I0fSqHV2iWA7xvWdK-bxqpsHiisPnyta1mLmkHOk7rPugpYGQX1KK_Yp-7Jea1azpW5VoMvo_psr4iW6fvNL8/s445/thief.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="287" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5SzfUnxj6-ZylHHX26qH-e57kTa2J7rVjglfefLyYVVy3IHVwf4JmSYLkmLH1osNa0CGubslvLvej6nRxL8Qvg0HjtHrYleVSbiAtl3I0fSqHV2iWA7xvWdK-bxqpsHiisPnyta1mLmkHOk7rPugpYGQX1KK_Yp-7Jea1azpW5VoMvo_psr4iW6fvNL8/w129-h200/thief.jpg" width="129" /></a></div><p>by<br />Scott D. Parker<br /><br />Gather ‘round kids and let me tell about something we had back in the day. Here in Houston, there was a store that let you rent audiobooks just like Blockbuster. T’was a great store, especially in the days before digital audiobooks are everywhere.<br /><br />One of the books I listened to decades ago was The Christmas Thief by Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. What I didn’t know then was that this was the second Christmas novel that Mary and Carol wrote together. What made these books special—other than the mother/daughter relationship—was the crossover aspect of the stories. <br /><br />One of Mary’s series featured lottery winner, Alvirah Meehan, and her husband Willy. She cleaned houses in New York while Willy was a plumber. They starred in four standalone novels before the four Christmas novels. <br /><br />On Carol’s side, there was Reagan Reilly, a private investigator. In the first book, Deck the Halls, Reagan meets Alvirah at a dentist’s office and quickly get wrapped up in the kidnapping of Reagan’s dad and his driver. <br /><br />Here in The Christmas Thief, all the characters are friends now, and they are planning a trip to Stowe, Vermont. Alvirah and Willy want to see the maple tree their lawyers bought for them—what do you buy lottery winners for Christmas—and they bring along Opal. She’s a fellow lottery winner who ran into some bad luck. Twelve years ago, Opal invested her lottery winnings with Packy Noonan, a guy who swindled Opal and other senior citizens out of their money. <br /><br />Packy’s done his time and now he’s getting out of prison with a single-minded goal: travel up to Stowe and retrieve a flask full of uncut diamonds worth over $70 million and escape to Brazil. <br /><br />Here’s the catch: unbeknownst to Packy, “his” tree has actually been selected to be used as the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Now, the con has to figure out how to get his diamonds without anybody the wiser. That proves harder than he bargained for when all the characters show up in Stowe. <br /><br />Carol Higgins Clark narrates the audiobook which I was able to find after extensive searching. She does a good job with the different New England accents. The story itself would make a fun TV movie. There’s not a lot of peril and some of Packy’s cohorts are just not that smart. I have to admit that I “cast” a certain actor as Packy as I listened to this book. He’s one of the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, and having this actor in mind made the story even better.<br /><br />I’m always on the lookout for Christmas stories and now I’ve read two of the four books by Mary and Carol. I love crossovers and now I think I’ll try some of the non-Christmas books by these two gifted storytellers. <br /></p>Scott D. Parkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15293540073601809197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-68573285756492312702023-12-13T08:30:00.001-05:002023-12-13T14:10:48.061-05:00THE SAME OLD SONG: Presenting the Introduction to Rock and a Hard Place's THE ONE PERCENT <p>If you've noticed there's been a suspicious lack of Paul J. Garth posting on Do Some Damage lately, well, first, I'm going to have to question your priorities in life, even if it is appreciated. But this week I'm back, and I promise my absence has had good reasons. </p><p>You're probably thinking the reason I've been quiet is because I'm still writing my novel (you'd be right!) but the other reason is because, for the last month, me and the rest of the Rock and a Hard Place editorial staff have been nose to the grindstone working on getting our latest anthology <i>THE ONE PERCENT: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved</i> in tip-top shape out and out the door. </p><p>To say we're proud of this anthology is an understatement. It is, in my opinion, one of the best things we've ever done, taking the feeling of living through a rigged game and aiming it right back at the cheaters and exploiters and vampirous freaks who would see us all reduced to livestock if only to make a 3% bounce in their chosen stock prices. To be clear, we don't think we're going to necessarily change anything, other than writing in big black permanent marker how intolerable conditions have become for those who think they're still on the guest list of the party (surprise - they aint), but still, this is a book whose assembled voices are vital. In it, we took care to not only show how little life matters to those at the top, we searched for and shaped voices that otherwise are never heard - often because of the prejudices of those captains of industry who hold our world in a stranglehold. </p><p>We're so proud, we're presenting the foreword to <i>THE ONE PERCENT: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved</i>, right here on DSD. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8sWUm_S3A-1ruGNwhOHg8wfxFLZ1Qw8db5m5JZxMGghMxmIYt8XIz1xPHNnasgc2aCaXk0JOUF7AsHPdyO0mM4I28XtGHaX7ZqxeNrohJh-Jx3e51qiGPGNRlC7OnepTpd4ICzG_IkCjUpmp6mcUz5Pqp7MTZWbtFwGGq58g5pGN0TUT-s2AK0R_IEW8s/s1500/TheOnePercent.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="938" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8sWUm_S3A-1ruGNwhOHg8wfxFLZ1Qw8db5m5JZxMGghMxmIYt8XIz1xPHNnasgc2aCaXk0JOUF7AsHPdyO0mM4I28XtGHaX7ZqxeNrohJh-Jx3e51qiGPGNRlC7OnepTpd4ICzG_IkCjUpmp6mcUz5Pqp7MTZWbtFwGGq58g5pGN0TUT-s2AK0R_IEW8s/w250-h400/TheOnePercent.jpg" width="250" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Check out the forward below, and when you're done, swing by your local suffocating conglomerate to pick up a copy of the book. Your screams deserve to be heard. And one thing I'm convinced of is this: No matter how many dollar bills they stuff themselves with, eventually, they <i>will </i>hear us. </p><p>Buy <a href="https://www.amazon.com/One-Percent-Tales-Wealthy-Depraved" target="_blank">THE ONE PERCENT: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved here</a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>THE SAME OLD SONG</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Welcome to the new order. It’s the same as the old order. </p><p>We work hard and they get rich. We follow the rules and they flout them. </p><p>Now it looks like tech bros on yachts and private spaceships to the moon. A hundred years ago it was oil barons and railroad tycoons. People profit from the destruction of the planet just as they did off slave labor. It’s a child digging minerals to power your smartphone just as it was young women burning to death in a t-shirt factory.</p><p>The issue of absurd wealth concentrated in the blood-soaked hands of the few is as much a constant in our history as war and racism.</p><p>With The One Percent: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved, we give you stories of those at the top. Though these stories are fictional and are individual accounts of people at the highest tiers of our economic system, we hope that collectively they point to a larger systemic problem, which is the fact that our economic system incentivizes cut-throat nastiness. Having a system that rewards people for hoarding wealth and taking advantage of others means individuals with fewer scruples are more likely to rise to the top and that those that may have some basic sense of ethics or human empathy quickly learn to abandon it in order to compete. </p><p>To say that this is a systemic problem is not to absolve the individuals who benefit from the system from their guilt and culpability. They take part in it, uphold it, and further it for their own sakes. They’re the architects of the system, the maintainers of the status quo. </p><p>We hope this volume serves as some small form of accountability, as a way of saying that, though we are forced to live in this system for our own survival, we are not blind to it. This is our way of saying that although they have taken the majority of our waking hours, they have not taken our creativity or our humanity. </p><p>In this collection, you’ll read stories of glorious comeuppance. As one of our authors writes, there are spiders that “eat other spiders,” and you’ll read about people out of their depths, blinded by the promise of easy cash and paying for it in the end. But there are others still, who just get away with it, who treat people like pieces on a gameboard, and never learn their lesson—because in the end, they still come out on top.</p><p>What we tried to do is find a mix of the unrepentant and the unfazed. But we never want to glorify those captains of industry who profit from the misery of others. This anthology is about showcasing the problems of immense, unchecked wealth. It’s not our usual fare of people struggling to eke out survival, but it is still presented with the trademark RHP brand of social justice and basic fairness. In this anthology, we let our authors do bad things to bad people . . . and the results are entertaining as fuck. </p><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>If that doesn't want to make you throw a brick through Muskrats front window, I don't know what will. If you were on the fence at all, hopefully that's pushed you to our side. If so, you can buy <a href="https://www.amazon.com/One-Percent-Tales-Wealthy-Depraved" target="_blank">THE ONE PERCENT: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved here</a></div><div><br /></div><div>I'll be back next week, with an interview with the one and only M.E. Proctor. Until then, stay frosty, friends. </div>Paul J. Garthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07036442497521739760noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7119990365479009764.post-61900461726300326142023-12-12T03:00:00.007-05:002023-12-12T03:00:00.222-05:00The One Per Cent: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">For some years now, <i>Rock and a Hard Place</i>, based in New Jersey, has been publishing superb crime fiction. It has what you might call a decidedly working class slant, favoring the underdogs in life, the people working hard yet still struggling in a difficult world of economic uncertainty. The magazine comes out regularly, and two years ago, <i>Rock and a Hard Place</i> put out the anthology called <i>Under the Thumb: Stories of Police Oppression</i>. That title alone gives you an idea of where the publication's editors -- led by founders Roger Nokes and Jay Butkowski -- are coming from, and now they have a new anthology they've put out, a collection called, <i>The One Per Cent: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved</i>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8cyTx2m_vC2b7zI14i8A1-gJUas2VTov8mfkxEu8gANYFT0TEn13-XuBRBFQTIu_X3GDYzWhNnwXgx5S-q9wYpcntu22cN4mfDFGYhVorXtxP__io6t1wjHYo4ZF-f_FZugsfNskjSFGntBRPeciLYWHp3d8TqmKbasx-AqziA1UmX3oa23lxn8JbWZXQ/s284/Super%20Rich.load.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="177" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8cyTx2m_vC2b7zI14i8A1-gJUas2VTov8mfkxEu8gANYFT0TEn13-XuBRBFQTIu_X3GDYzWhNnwXgx5S-q9wYpcntu22cN4mfDFGYhVorXtxP__io6t1wjHYo4ZF-f_FZugsfNskjSFGntBRPeciLYWHp3d8TqmKbasx-AqziA1UmX3oa23lxn8JbWZXQ/s1600/Super%20Rich.load.jpg" width="177" /></span></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The title explains things clearly enough, but as the editors say about the anthology, "For this volume, featuring 16 stories designed to make your blood boil, we decided to switch up the formula a little bit. <i>Rock and a Hard Place</i> has always been about promoting stories of struggle, to never lose sight of the human being who's at the core of that struggle. In these stories, our writers are skewering the rich, and instead of celebrating humanity, we're lamenting the loss of humanity in pursuit of obscene levels of wealth." </span></p><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It all sounds good, but wait! The way most people, or at least a lot of people, will order this book will be through Amazon, which belongs to we-all-know-who, an irony, or paradox, or whatever you want to call it -- a fact of life -- of today's world. No matter: the book remains the book, its merits to be judged not by where you buy it, but by the fiction between its covers. The quality, in the end, is the primary thing that counts. As the editors say, there are 16 stories here, detailing the doings of the rich and vile. Are there people extravagantly rich who are not vile? Of course there are. People are people, no matter their economic station. You just won't find those type of wealthy people in this particular anthology.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The contributors are <span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111;">C.W. Blackwell, Scott Von Doviak, Esther Mubawa, James D.F. Hannah, AD Schweiss, Thomas Trang, Meirav Devash, Eddie McNamarra, Andrew Rucker Jones, Sam Wiebe, Curtis Ippolito, Tim P. Walker, Jesse Lee, Sean Logan, Tom Andes, Steven-Elliot Altman, and Lin Morris.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">And the book can be ordered (this is the way of the world) here: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPV4GFHD">The One Percent</a>.</span></span></p><p><span face="futura-pt" style="color: #0b2700;"><span style="background-color: #f2f2f2; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: 0.4px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>scott adlerberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10997101672313963063noreply@blogger.com0