THE ULTIMATE LIQUID ASSET

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely f**ked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”


Massive Dust storms from abandoned farmland add to the misery of those left alive.

Water is going to be more expensive than gasoline.

Water is going to be more precious than gold.

Water is going to be fought over.

“Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.”

The world in the future is going to tilt sideways and only a few are going to be able to hold on.

When I lived in Phoenix in the 1990s, the city was in constant litigation with Los Angeles. Both communities were/are dependent on the Colorado River. L.A. was ascerting that Phoenix kept more than their share of the water from the Colorado River. This was true. The boom of large cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas moved a lot of people from places that had adequate sources of water to places where water is scarce. The weather in these communities, though too warm for some people during the summer, is a dry heat, and for most of the year the temperatures are moderate. It is easy to live there. I was meeting people all the time who gave up great paying jobs in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C. etc. to come live in The Valley even though they made considerably less money.

In 1986 (revised 1993), a reporter by the name of Marc Reisner wrote a book called Cadillac Desert that talked about a coming apocalypse in the West over water. “In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.” Water, worth billions then, is worth more now and will be worth an incalculable amount in the near future.

But then, ultimately, we can put a dollar amount on just about anything. The problem is that you and I may not have enough.

”The Doomsday preppers will be fine though right?

Angel snorted. ‘F**king preppers.’

‘You have issues with them?’

‘Just when we pump their wells dry.’ He laughed cynically. ‘Never could figure out why people would think they could survive all out on their lonesome like that. All of them sitting in their little bunkers, thinking they’re going to ride out the apocalypse alone.’

‘Maybe they watch too many old Westerns.’

‘Nobody survives on their own.’ Angel’s vehemence made Lucy suspect he wasn’t really talking about preppers.”

There is speculation in the book about the ability of Americans, even those that are not batshit crazy doomsday preppers, to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. ”...people are alone here in America. They’re all alone. And they don’t trust anyone except themselves, and they don’t rely on anyone except themselves. He said that is why India would survive all this apocalyptic shit, but America wouldn’t.” We have become so fearful of co-dependency issues that we have become tribal units of one or in a best case scenario a tribe of immediate family. We are certainly vulnerable to catastrophe. I agree with those thoughts, but I also think we have always proven ourselves adaptable. The question will be will we change fast enough to save ourselves.


NOAH an arcology system designed for New Orleans. In the book New Orleans collapses very early.

Angel Velasquez has survived the water collapse. He was plucked out of prison by Catherine Case, who has become the most powerful woman in the West. She controls the Nevada water from her stronghold in Las Vegas. She builds arcology habitats that are self-sufficient for water and also for all the other needs of the residents. These lucky arcology people are isolated, living in a bubble, immune to the suffering and dying going on mere yards away from their habitat. They are not for people like you and me. We are merely: ”Human spackle, filling the cracks of disaster.”The people living in these safe havens are very, very wealthy people. Angel is one of Case’s most trusted Water Knives. He and other loyal hand-picked members go out and enforce her water rights, and ensure the continued Disneyland existence of her arcology residents.

She makes towns die.

Phoenix is next on her list.

She dispatches Angel to Phoenix to see what is going on. Zona is up to their eyeballs in Texans and holy rollers. The city is coming apart at the seams. Coyotes are taking people’s money to take them North and then executing them in the desert. Desperation colors everything and everyone. Bangbang girls (Texas teenagers) are prostituting themselves with wealthy executives just for an opportunity to take a shower and wash their clothes in a hotel. Who actually controls the water is being disputed. The man who had the papers with the ancient water rights (written on actual paper) has been mutilated, tortured, killed. The papers are in the wind, and it is Angel’s job to get them back.

He meets Lucy Monroe, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who made her first mark writing Collapse Porn. The world couldn’t get enough of all the scenes of degradation and death. They are an unlikely pair, but then Lucy has certainly become someone she didn’t expect to be. Phoenix has changed her. ”Phoenix made people crazy…. Sometimes it turned people into devils so bad they weren’t recognizable as human. And other times it turned them into goddamn saints.”

She was more saint than devil, but she couldn’t deny that she had a bit too much of both to have much of a chance of surviving in a place where it is becoming apparent that no one is in charge. The whole city is going tribal.

”It never rains in Phoenix, except when it’s raining bodies.”

Alliances are changing and re-forming. Gut wrenching betrayals are making it hard for anyone to trust anyone. California is working against Las Vegas. Las Vegas is working against Phoenix. States are controlling their borders, keeping the parched refugees from the Southern states from invading. Everyone has spies gathering information that can mean the difference between a community flourishing or a community declining. Cadillac Desert has become a water Bible as people try to understand exactly what has happened to them and what is continuing to happen to them.


It is logical to cut off water to the rural areas when water becomes scarce. The problem is that it creates a food shortage. Land that is not being used for crops drys out and begins to blow creating massive, dangerous dust storms.

This book is set in the near future. The plot of this novel could be the harbinger of a future prize winning work of nonfiction. The book gave me shivers because the possibilities of this becoming reality are all too probable. It is such a compulsive read that I read the last 220 pages in one sitting interrupted only by the need for a glass of water to parch the thirst the book inspired. Noir is hardboiled into the inflections of speech, into the scars, into the actions of the characters. Bodies pile up, massive dust storms blanket the city, and uncontrollable fires greedily eat up the dry tinder of abandoned buildings. Phoenix has become hell on Earth. Water has become something no one has enough of.

I also really enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s book My The Windup Girl Review

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STEPHEN KING'S POLITICAL THRILLER STILL HAS BITE

The Dead Zone by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.”


Who else but Christopher Walken could play Johnny Smith in the highly praised David Cronenberg film?

Johnny Smith is a rookie teacher with $8 in his pocket, just enough money to take his best girl Sarah, also a new teacher, to the local county fair. Sarah is coming off a couple of recent relationships that were exciting with aggressive, unpredictable men. Johnny is a step in a new direction, maybe a more responsible direction not driven as much by physical attraction as by mental stimulation.

She has no idea who Johnny is, but that can’t be helped because Johnny doesn’t really know who he is either.

We get our first inkling that something is different about Johnny as they are leaving the fair. The Wheel of Fortune guy running a crude version of the roulette wheel tempts Johnny over to try his luck with his last few remaining dollars. Johnny starts by betting on black or red and wins. As his confidence grows, he starts picking exact numbers and keeps winning. A crowd is drawn to this run of luck.

But is it luck?

He turns his meager money into three months pay.

Sarah becomes sick from a bad hot dog. Johnny quits the game to take her home. Since they came in her car, he takes a taxi back to his apartment.

There is an accident, and Johnny goes through the windshield.

He doesn’t wake up for four and half years.

His mother, never a stable person before, becomes more frantically religious. She throws herself at every new religious concept, even going so far at one point to joining a commune who are waiting for alien space ships to come pick them up to take them to God. With each new religious venture she brings the Smith’s closer to bankruptcy. Religious zealotry is always so scary to me. They believe it, whatever it is, so fervently that any rational thought is wrestled to the ground and pinned by unquestioning faith.

When Johnny comes out of his coma, he has the ability/curse of being able to touch someone or something owned by that person (psychometry) and see pieces of their future. Some key elements always seem to be missing, and those murky parts Johnny calls The Dead Zone.

An ability like this? Well...it scares people.

”The nurses were lined up against the glass of the nurses’ station, staring at him. Suddenly they reminded him of crows on a telephone line, crows staring down at something bright and shiny, something to be pecked at and pulled apart.”

That does seem to be our nature to fear what we don’t understand, quickly followed by the need to destroy what we fear. Anyone different, whether they have a unconventional sexual orientation or a disfigurement or just see the world differently, will feel the constant pressure to conform or...disappear. It is only logical of course that if Johnny knows about a fire before it happens that he must have been involved in setting that fire. The possibility of clairvoyance is too unique, too extraordinary for others to comprehend.

Johnny is ridiculed, exposed as a charlatan. He is fine with that. It might mean he has a chance to find a normal life.

He is doing well until a small town Sheriff can’t catch the Raincoat Serial Killer.


A handshake can be so revealing. And yes that is Martin Sheen playing Greg Stillson.

As Johnny is finding himself back in the spotlight, there is another man, a Bible salesman by the name of Greg Stillson, who is starting to have big thoughts, dreams of more power than any lunatic should ever have.

Stephen King is setting up a collision course between the two men, both unusual, both psychotic, but on opposite sides of the same scale.

When Johnny shakes Stillson’s hand, he sees a future that can not be allowed to happen.

If you could build a time machine and go back to 1932 and kill Adolf Hitler, would you do it? It seems logical that you would save millions of lives, which I can’t even calculate the number of descendants of those saved lives. The implications of lives that never existed in our timeline suddenly being thrust into our era are staggering. The reshuffling of the DNA deck is mind boggling. On a micro level it could change your own personal history significantly. Your grandfather might marry someone different or your mother might meet someone before your father that didn’t exist before. You could wink out of existence before you can even fire up the time machine to return to 2015. Knowing the historical results of Hitler being alive, even though there is always the risk that someway, somehow by altering history you might make our present worse, I would still have to vote that I would gladly assassinate Hitler. On top of being a monster, Adolf was also monstrously annoying.

I might even take a short detour and take out Joseph Stalin as well. I’m already rolling the dice, so why not cast them out there one more time? I’d chalk up another couple of million lives saved.

Alter another gazillion time lines of history.

Good lord, the enormity of it and the logic and the illogicalness of it all start to circle back around until it becomes very easy to talk oneself out of such a risky decision.

Nobody wants to destroy the world while trying to save it.

Johnny goes through the same thought processes. Logically, he should find a way to stop Stillson, but there is the nagging worry that he could just make things worse.

This is not a horror book. It is a psychological thriller written by a writer near the top of his game. While working in the book business, I have always puzzled over why Stephen King was read by so many people. Of course, then I didn’t read him. I didn’t need to read him because there were already plenty of people queuing up to buy and read his next book. My job, of course, was to read people like Cormac McCarthy or Alan Furst, or writers like John Williams and try to bring them to a wider audience. I have tried a couple of newer King offerings, but have found them to be bloated, overwritten, and ponderous. I read The Shining, fairly recently, and realized that the King’s gold is in the dusty trunks of his early writings.


The book spawned a movie, which spawned a popular TV show starring Anthony Michael Hall.

King even made a playful reference to his book Carrie in this novel which made me laugh-out-loud. It was a bit of tongue in cheek referring to his own celebrity.

This book also fits very nicely into my 1970s nostalgic tour of horror books even though technically I can’t call this horror. Here are the other books that I've read on this quest.

The Exorcist Review
The Shining Review
Jaws Review
The Omen Review
Harvest Home Review


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THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE BY PHILIP K. DICK

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”



If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been assassinated in 1934 instead of dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1945, what would the world look like? Do our lives, our futures, hang on the shoulders of one man? The New Deal that gave Roosevelt so much power, so much influence with the American public, would not have been possible if presented by a different man, a less sure man, a man more willing to make deals to pass the legislation even if it guts the intent of the program. The American people have probably never trusted a politician as much as they trusted FDR. So if we remove him from history during those critical years in the 1940s when the world went mad, what would happen?

Philip K. Dick is going to tell you.

We lose.

The Pacific States form a new country called The Pacific States of America and are controlled by Imperial Japan. A Rocky Mountain States is formed as a buffer between The Reich Controlled East Coast of America and the PSA. Europe is under the management of the Reich. The Soviets were completely destroyed by the Reich, and most were exterminated. A cold war has sprung up between the two remaining superpowers: the Japanese and the Reich. Adolf Hitler has descended into madness…batshit crazy madness... not the garden variety I want to rule the world madness.

”Old Adolf, supposed to be in a sanitarium somewhere, living out his life of senile paresis. Syphilis of the brain, dating back to his poor days as a bum in Vienna...long black coat, dirty underwear, flophouses.”

There is this interesting film called Max starring John Cusack from 2002 that was directed by Menno Meyjes. It discusses the possibility of what would have happened if Hitler had been accepted as an artist. Would he have channeled his anger into something more edifying than world destruction? I know that others, besides myself, must have watched that film, but they seem to be few and far between.


Noah Taylor plays the young, frustrated Hitler.

Martin Bormann has been in charge of the Reich, but with his death a power struggle has broken out between Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann Göring for the ultimate leadership. The thought of those men surviving the war gives me a chill. Hitler may have brought the vision, but these were the men who implemented it.

Robert Childan owns an Americana antique business on Montgomery Street in San Francisco. The Japanese are avid collectors of old American gadgets, comic books, and toys. He used to run a bookstore, but found that dealing in Americana was much more profitable. He isn’t an expert, which as the story unfolds, creates some issues for him. People don’t mind paying exorbitant prices as long as what they buy is legitimate. He meets a young progressive Japanese couple who want to discuss a future based on the book by Hawthorne Abendsen called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which presents an alternative reality where the Axis lost and the Allies won. It is still different from our present day, but certainly more recognizable than the dystopia of The Man in the High Castle.

Philip K. Dick is having a bit of fun writing an alternative reality which includes a novel about alternative reality.

The young couple are very disappointed to learn that Childan has not read the book. They assumed that any “American” would want to read this book. They were also disappointed that Childan, when pressed for his own philosophical take on this life, mouths the platitudes of the controlling governments because he thinks that is what his potential clients want to hear. I expected more from one of my own kind, a retired bookseller, but in his defense he doesn’t want unwarranted attention. He doesn’t want change as much as he wants to be safe. “What they do not comprehend is man’s helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn’t it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small . . . and you will escape the jealousy of the great.”


Mokkei Tiger from the 13th Century

Childan does get a glimmer of a lost past that might be reclaimed by the future when he holds the Frank Frink jewelry collection in his hands. Frink has recently left his work of employment, where he made replica guns from America’s past (for those Japanese collectors), to start his own business designing and creating original jewelry. To Childan the jewelry is much more than just pretty bobbles to adorn women’s throats, fingers, and wrists. It represents the American ingenuity that used to determine the fashions, trends, and innovations that led the world.

Meanwhile, Frink’s ex-wife, who lives in the RMS, has taken up with a truck driver who is not who he says he is. He has an agenda involving The Man in the High Castle. The man, Abendsen, who has taken the world by storm with his book depicting a different outcome from the war.

The I Ching plays a pivotal role as characters use I Ching to make decisions. Dick also used the I Ching to determine the twists of the plot as he was writing it.


Having difficulty making decisions? Do you find that most of the time you make poor decisions? Turn your life over to the I Ching. Your future will no longer be your fault.

This book convinced me of the viability of this alternative reality. I certainly would have read more about this world that Dick created. The ending is open because Dick had always planned to write a sequel, but he couldn’t progress on the second book because he couldn’t stand the thought of going back and reading about Nazis. I’m in the same boat recently with all the history channels that I normally watch suddenly becoming obsessed with everything Third Reich. This is disturbing to me because programming is based off viewership, and obviously they have determined that people are tuning in to watch Nazi documentaries more than other much more fascinating time periods of world history. *Sigh* I don’t know what that means!

Amazon has recently filmed the pilot episode of a new series based on The Man in the High Castle. The episode is available on streaming. I read this book another lifetime ago, but wanted to refresh my memory before watching the pilot episode. I’m glad I did as much of my memories of the book had eroded into snippets of disjointed pieces. There is much more in the book than what I’ve discussed, but I hope what I have decided to highlight will encourage more people to read this novel of science fiction that also can rest comfortably on the same shelf as literature.

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PRAGUE BY ARTHUR PHILLIPS

Prague by Arthur Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"What does it mean to fret about your fledgling career when the man across the table was tortured by two different regimes? How does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion?"


Budapest: City of Grit

John Price left California for Budapest in search of adventure, but also to reconnect to his older brother Scott. When he was younger, Scott was a fat, unathletic, unhappy kid, but since leaving for Europe, he has sculpted his body and mind into someone very different from whom he used to be. By being around John again all the insecurities of his past come back to nag at the veneer of his new identity.

When I graduated from high school, I moved to Phoenix to go to college. I can still remember waking up that first morning in Arizona and thinking to myself I don’t know a single soul in this city. I was elated. I could finally be me. Growing up, especially in a small farming community, everyone knows everything about you. They have these disjointed ideas of who you are that have been formed from the shedded skins of your younger self. You have no control over what they decide to remember (or exaggerate) about you, and to ever escape those older versions of yourself is impossible. I wish I’d been able to flee to a vibrant European city like Budapest but I had to settle for Phoenix.

Scott does introduce John to his group of ex-pat, pseudo-intellectual friends. In the midst of them is a corn fed, patriotic to the bone woman from Nebraska named Emily. There is also Charles, an investment banker, who in the course of the novel puts together a deal to bring the historic Horvath press back to life. ”There was something incorrect about this boy. His smile and word of thanks were wrong. He was made of dirty mirrors.” There is Mark, a Canadian, in love with architecture and the past. ”Can you imagine standing right here and being in love and seeing the world how it looked before movies existed, before movies made you see everything a certain way?”

As John settles into the city and starts to make a name for himself as a journalist working for BudapesToday, he begins to put together a life of his own. He finds an apartment, absurdly cheap. ”The balcony’s floor was cracked in a map of meandering rivers, demarcating flakes, and slabs of concrete loose enough to lift. It seemed evident that eventually the balcony would collapse under its own, or someone else’s weight. The building’s exterior walls bore decades-old scars and bullet holes.” The original owner leaves a picture of his wife and asked that John not take it down. This picture becomes a talisman of the apartment to the point that she almost seems like a part of John’s own past.

He meets a colorful Hungarian woman named Nadja at a bar who tells him stories of her past. She has been forced to leave Budapest too many times but always comes back when sanity has returned. John takes Emily to see Nadja in the hopes of impressing her, but Emily can not believe that someone has had that many experiences. To John those stories are wonderful pieces of culture history. To Emily they are just lies.

As I skimmed some other reviews of this book, it was interesting to see the reactions to these twenty something characters who are all very intelligent, who have just read enough, seen enough, to formulate what they feel are informed opinions, but of course they are just on the beginning edges of actually knowing what they are talking about. The people who gave this book one star because they loathed the characters I believe missed some of the point of the book because Arthur Phillips is very hard on these people. He exposes them. He certainly does not romanticize them. I identified with many aspects of these characters. The flaws they display are certainly ones that I could attribute to my past self as I grappled with knowledge, trying to evolve beyond just being smart into someone with actual intelligence.


I must warn you about travelling to Budapest. I did have to dance for my supper.

The one star reviews seemed intent on punishing a writer for creating characters they’ve met versions of in real life and didn’t like. Many of them admitted, begrudgingly, that the lyrical writing is at times awe inspiring. Phillips also displays a depth of understanding of the human condition that had me rereading and thinking about passages such as this:

”John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.”

I must admit though I really didn’t like Emily. She is so square, so judgmental, and certainly someone who would give this book a one star rating. She certainly wouldn’t like the direction her character takes, a direction she would have thought was impossible.

Luckily, John meets the plucky, bald headed, artist Nicky who makes him really see things, and forces him to expand his thinking about what he really wants out of life. She has her thorns certainly and is always looking to fortify the voracious hunger of the creative monster. ”John, not knowing the topic under discussion, knew she was collecting garbage to feed her ravenous, drooling Muse, and loved her for her open use of people, even himself.”

Phillips also weaves in the history of the Horvath Press and the heritage of the current owner, Imre. The Press survived war, poor ownership, and anticipated the changing tastes of the Hungarian population. The books he published saved the cultural history not only of his city, but also of his country. ”This was Hungary, and Imre was its memory. For some, the book acted almost as an opiate: The pleasure of leisurely or impatiently traveling from page to page and seeing lovely Budapest unbombed, undamaged, in black and white, was almost pornographic in its unattainable, voluptuous gorgeousness. Lipotavaros, the Elizabeth Bridge, the Corso, the Castel, the Nyugati Station in the day of its inauguration--the day it was the largest, cleanest train station in the world….”

Towards the end of the book the First Gulf War breaks out. Mark becomes absolutely addicted to CNN, which was the station that first gave us the twenty-four hour news cycle. I was working at Bookman’s Used Books in Tucson at the time. We brought a TV up to the front of the store so that we could get updates as the war unfolded. The war was over so quickly that it almost felt like a movie with too abrupt an ending. Like most of America, for quite a while, I continued to be addicted to news. My obsession with play-by-play news cooled a long time ago as I discovered that news is too influenced by half lies, hidden truths, and political agendas.



Maybe there is some fascinating reason why Phillips decided to call this book Prague, but I actually find it annoying. Almost all the book is set in Budapest, so logically the book should bear the name of that city not the sister city on the Danube who has always been considered more elegant, more interesting. It has been a long time since I’ve been to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, but I remember mimosas for breakfast in Vienna, a wonderful vibe in Budapest, and the breathtaking beauty of Prague. Each city was easily explored on foot and provided new wonders around nearly every corner. I can’t recommend that tour enough.

You may not like the characters, but I will say that no one remains twenty forever, and most pseudo intellectuals eventually discover how much more there is to know than what they can ever know. They grow up, and most become more humble. They take hard knocks just like the rest of us do and soon realize the universe doesn’t play favorites. With time, they become less self-absorbed and start to realize the benefits of using their intellect to help people instead of using it to offer a pithy evaluation of others' shortcomings. You might like these people better in their forties, but until then don’t bother to hate them. The wax of their character is still being poured into the mold.

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THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK BY DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*****WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE*****

“I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.”


I would say that Miss Lessing was very fetching when she was younger, but I don’t want to be accused of objectifying her. :-)

Anna keeps four notebooks, each representing different versions of herself, all with the intent of discovering the truth about herself. The red, the yellow, the black, and the blue covers, if all goes well, will merge into one golden notebook. An evolution of understanding that will set her free.

Free of what you might ask?

If she can ever discover her true self, she can escape the traitorous self she has always been. It is proving nearly impossible. ”I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective.’ Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.”

The only way to escape our past is to understand it. We must be at peace with it, but the past seeps into the present and the future, despite our best efforts to control it. ”At that time in my life, for reasons I didn’t understand until later, I didn’t let myself be chosen by men who really wanted me.” She isn’t that person now, not that it has made her any happier. By believing this, it says a lot about how she felt about herself. Any man who found her attractive or interesting became less desirable to her. Now she does let men choose her, and that has led to a series of temporary, unfulfilling relationships with married men. Did she learn from her past or is this just another form of avoiding commitment?

Their marriages are of no interest to her nor is she interested in the prospect of a marriage for herself. How can she discover who she is if she has to live in the shadow of a man as Mrs. _______? Marriage allows him to define her, and that elusive free self she is looking for will be forever buried under the avalanche of lost time given to achieving his desires, satisfying his whims, and helping him be successful. ”I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men’s criticising us for being ‘castrating’…. for the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man…. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.”

As women are trying to find themselves, define themselves, men are losing themselves. Men used to have clearly delineated roles... hunt, kill, protect... that evolved into... sports/academics, careers, providing. They were the head of household, but now that is less likely as women are becoming more successful in the work force. Men are being diminished as the balance of power in a household has shifted to something more equal. This is not a bad thing, but it is creating necessary adjustments for men who used to have a simple defined goal as to how they would be considered successful. This role is evolving into a blending of responsibilities where much of what they do is not weighed and measured.

Of course, it feels like a step back as men are not needed to be men in the same way they were sixty years ago or a thousand and sixty years ago. Giving up this power has been a long time coming, but women who are dismissive of men who still hold on too tightly to old traditional roles must understand that it is scary to think of who we are without them.

”You’re such a perfectionist. You’re an absolutist. You measure everything against some kind of ideal that exists in your head, and if it doesn’t come up to your beautiful notions then you condemn it out of hand. Or you pretend to yourself that it’s beautiful even when it isn’t.”

I’ve always believe in the old adage that has been attributed to Albert Einstein. “Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.” I don’t know which is more unrealistic.

I was flipping around the channels one day and landed on Oprah, not sure why because I never watch daytime talk shows, but there was a crowd of mostly women complaining about men. As I was listening to them speak, I realized that these women didn’t want more sympathy or more consideration from men, but actually wanted men to be more like them. They wanted men to have similar emotional responses to circumstances as women do. Narcissistic to say the least. Why would anyone want to hold up a mirror to their spouse and see themselves? I think it is important that we react somewhat differently to situations. My son leaving for college was very emotional for my wife who thought she was losing something. For me, his leaving was a matter of pride because I could see him as a man instead of a boy.

So when women talk about changing a man, are they truly talking about changing him into being more like themselves? Are they molding him to fulfill their vision of a progressive, successful future? If this is the case, I would say that the shifting power is having a detrimental effect and could be contributing to an increasing divorce rate. Couples, in my opinion, should be working towards common goals, but also in some cases towards separate goals as well. As women free themselves, they need to make sure they aren’t incarcerating their spouses (unless that turns him on) in the process.

”His green eyes were fixed, not seeing his mouth, like a spoon or a spade or a machine-gun, shot out, spewed out, hot aggressive language, words like bullets. ‘I’m not going to be destroyed by you. By anyone. I’m not going to be shut up, caged, tamed, told be quiet keep your place do as you’re told I’m not...I’m saying what I think, I don’t buy your world.’

It disappoints Anna that when she falls in love with the American, who has been kicked out of the communist party for being anti-Stalinist too soon (It never pays to be right first.), that she falls into a traditional role of wanting exclusivity and finding herself consumed by jealousy. Her whole life’s work has come undone. The golden notebook proves more elusive than the golden snitch.



This book has carried a heavy load as one of the major pieces of feminist literature. Doris Lessing in 1962 was exploring concepts of what women should be striving for just as a growing number of women were starting to reject the idea that they had to fulfill the male version of what it means to be female. (They may have lost their way in the 1980s with the big shoulder pads. I was so glad when women quit dressing like offensive linemen. The last thing women should do is try to be more like men.) Though there were aspects that I disagreed with in this book, I thought overall it was fairly balanced. Lessing also points out some fallacies in thinking by women even as she celebrates Anna’s attempt to achieve true freedom. Although freedom can sometimes be a very lonely existence.

Understanding yourself so that you can express your true needs is important. Don’t expect others to intuitively know what you want. A revolution without a platform leads to blaming others instead of asking for change. People can make you unhappy or happy for a short time, but ultimately we all have to find ways to make ourselves happy. We have to understand and accept that we will never truly completely know ourselves. Don’t become so wrapped up in a personal philosophy that you forget to live.

Equality doesn’t scare me as long as women are raised up instead of men being brought down.

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THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE BY JAMES M. CAIN

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.”


John Garfield and Lana Turner in the 1946 movie.

Frank Chambers is a drifter, a man who, when life gets too heavy, catches the next boxcar out of town or puts his thumb out on the nearest highway. Being comfortable or achieving normalcy comes with too much responsibility. He’d rather bum it than have anyone relying on him.

It all begins with a sandwich in a California diner on a road in the middle of nearly nowhere. Nick “The Greek” Papadakis owns the diner and is in need of some help. The Greek offers Frank a job which even though he is broke still sounds like...well..work.

Until he meets Cora.

”Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t a raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”

He takes the job.

Something sparks between them, something desperate, something twisted, something so bad it is good. The first time The Greek leaves them alone, Frank is all over her:

”I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers….'Bite me! Bite me!'
I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.”


The steamy kitchen scene from the 1981 movie starring Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson

The pain they inflict on each other in that encounter is only the beginning of this passionate, sadomasochistic relationship with unexpected moments of what could be termed romance. ”Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.”

Which would all seem very sweet except for the fact that they are planning to kill The Greek. Frank would have never had the ambition for such a deed on his own. His idea is that they just take off, become gypsies, live off the land, but Cora wants to be free, and she also wants the diner.

She is a femme fatale.

“I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren’t drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.”

1946 poster for the movie

Frank is caught up in this woman who is game for anything. She lets him do things to her that would have most any other woman screaming for help. It is hard to determine if Cora actually had any feelings for Frank or for The Greek. Certainly, The Greek and Frank liked each other more than Cora liked either of them. Was she playing the game she had to play to get the accomplice she needed? Was the perversion of their relationship something she needed as well? The Greek was too old for her, but Frank as it turns out was not who she needed either.

The trial sequence is convoluted, crafty, and artful as their attorney builds this elaborate defense designed to defeat his frenemy, the prosecutor. He doesn’t care if they are guilty. He only cares about winning. Frank turns on Cora; Cora turns on Frank (another form of foreplay?) which is all part of the defense attorney's plan to set them free. The ending of the novel certainly seems a commentary by James M. Cain that people do not escape their guilts nor their destinies.


One of the more suggestive movie posters from 1981.

There has been much puzzlement over the title because there is no postman involved in the story or anything that would readily suggest a reason for the title. I’ve been doing some research, and it seems that the most logical explanation that people have come up with is that in this time period when the postman delivered the mail, he would ring the bell on the house once, but if he had a telegram, he would ring twice. Telegrams were expensive, and to receive one generally meant that something bad has happened. The title probably made more sense to people in 1934 than it does to us today. If we accept this explanation, then Cain is warning his audience that nothing good is coming.

This is a terrific noir novel, a prime example of the genre. This book and this writer have certainly had an enduring impact on not only the hard boiled mystery novel, but also on literature and Hollywood. The book has been filmed seven times with most people agreeing that the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner was the best. The book was banned in Boston for being too sexually violent. There were several scenes that even by contemporary standards had me squirming due to the graphic nature, but I was also reading with a certain amount of awe at the audacity of an author trying to depict the very real, dark aspects of a deranged, desperate relationship. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

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REAGAN, THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND.

Reagan: The Life by H.W. Brands
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”Reagan was called ‘the great communicator’ with reason, He was the most persuasive political speaker since Roosevelt, combining conviction, focus, and humor in the manner none of his contemporaries could approach. Reagan’s critics often dismissed the role of conviction in his persuasiveness; they attributed his speaking skill to his training as an actor. But this was exactly wrong. Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too.”



How can you not like Ronald Reagan? People disagree with him. People hate his politics. People (me) even believe he broke the law, but at the end of the day he really believed in America, and he revived some faith in the office of President...well…for a while. The Republican party has been searching for the next Reagan ever since he left office in 1988.

They have not succeeded.

”Pessimism pervades the thinking of conservatives, who tend to believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They might be right, but they aren’t fun to be around. Barry Goldwater appealed to people’s heads, but he left their hearts cold. Reagan was as conservative philosophically as Goldwater, but his sunny mien made Americans feel good about themselves and their country and made him irresistible at the polls.”

Unfortunately, in recent presidential elections the race has become a popularity contest. When the press is asking potential voters which candidate they would rather have a beer with, I can’t help but think that the press is actually encouraging people to assess candidates by the most shallow considerations. I had someone who worked for me who said he voted for George W. Bush because “he was a dummy like me.” Another person said that she was not going to vote for John Kerry because “his face is TOO long.” Candidates with extensive voting records, like Kerry, are finding it hard to win the presidency due to (obviously having too long a face) their voting records deconstructed by their adversaries who can always find pork in any bill and make a case for irresponsibility. Candidates with shorter times in office, and thus fewer opportunities to go on the record, fare better, like Barack Obama.

So if the trend is for less qualified candidates who have a nice smile or who have a special talent for composing quips or are a great speaker or just look damn good on camera, then the candidates most qualified generally don’t have much of a chance. If we accept that this is the future of the presidency, then we need to make damn sure that those candidates surround themselves with the very best counselors/advisors available. Second term presidents suffer more for many reasons, but one reason is the very best of the staff that they had for their first term generally move on because of burnout and/or a need to go back to the private sector to restart their careers.


Reagan had a good working relationship with all the world leaders. As you can see they formed their own superteam. Pope John Paul, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.

Jack Matlock was appalled at how little Reagan knew about the Soviet Union despite the fact that he railed against “the evil empire” every chance he got. ”Dealing as he did with Reagan every day, he was struck by the president’s spotty command of historical facts. Reagan had had very few contacts with Soviet officials and still tended to base many of his judgments more on generalities, even slogans, than on a nuanced understanding of Soviet reality.”

Reagan, fortunately, proved a quick study and was truly interested in the information, not enough to have ever picked up a book, but with these professionals tutoring him he was able to learn his lines.

His summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev regarding the reduction of the nuclear arsenals of both countries was frustrating to read. Gorbachev might be the most progressive leader ever seen to rise to power in Russia or the Soviet Union. He was convinced that changes needed to happen, and his first order of business was to end the cold war before it broke his country. His predecessors Chemenko, Andropov, and Brezhnev, who all died shortly after getting into office, would have never considered making the broad stroke changes that Gorbachev was proposing.


Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev wanted Reagan to keep his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), so famously called Star Wars, in the lab for ten years, but Reagan refused, even though the experts felt they were longer than ten years away from trying to deploy any part of it in space anyway. The two leaders walked away without a deal. It was a real missed opportunity.

Gorbachev ended the Cold War, not Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s famous speech about tearing down the wall in Berlin actually created a problem for Gorbachev who had already planned to bring the wall down, but that speech made it seem as if he was tearing the wall down because the United States demanded it. Reagan’s timing may not have been good for Gorbachev, but it was an excellent opportunity to add to the myth of Ronald Reagan.

Reading this book brought me a much better understanding of Nancy Reagan, maybe even giving me a slightly more positive view of her. Every day of her life was devoted to her husband. She would do anything to make sure he was successful. This at times made her very vindictive. It also spun her in occult directions, like consulting an astrologer about Reagan’s travel schedule. She didn’t run Reagan, but she ran everything in his life that he didn’t care about. She had a very good reason, as it turns out, to be paranoid about his safety even before John Hinkley Jr. tried to assassinate her husband.

”Nancy knew of the fatal pattern that had long afflicted presidents elected in years divisible by twenty. Since 1840 every chief executive so elected had died in office: William Henry Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy.”

Anybody else getting goose pimples.

I was hoping when I decided to read this book that H. W. Brands would be discussing the Iran-Contra Affair in detail. Maybe he didn’t go as deep into details as I was hoping for, but he did provide me with confirmation that Reagan did know. I can remember watching Colonel Oliver North in front of congress. I even rooted for him, admiring this one man who had been selected as the fall guy, standing up to the significant power of congress. He wasn’t the master mind. He was a soldier following orders. Reagan wrote in his diary:

”On one of the arms shipments the Iranians paid Israel a higher purchase price than we were getting. The Israelis put the difference in a secret bank account. Then our Col. North gave the money to the Contras.”

I do not recall

became the constant refrain to any of the questions asked of those in the administration called to testify. Even Reagan was deposed after he left office, and it is painful to watch. He is addled and fumbling for words, really a shell of the man who was once “the great communicator.” The Iran-Contra affair plunged his poll numbers to an all time low for him. His number never really recovered until many years later when people remembered how good he made them feel about being Americans more than they remembered the times he had stumbled.


The Villain Who Deceived or Hero Who Obeyed?

I loved the way H. W. Brands talked about the fickleness of politics. The points in an administration when one thing going right or one thing going wrong can make a huge difference. Jimmy Carter was a perfect example of a president who couldn’t catch a break. ”Paul Volcker was Jimmy Carter’s gift to Reagan; it was Volcker who squeezed the inflationary expectations out of the economy and put it on the path to solid growth. And he did so at just the right time for Reagan. If Volcker had taken charge of the fed two years earlier, the economy might have improved sufficiently that Carter and not Reagan would have been elected in 1980. If Volcker had arrived two years later, the recession that routed the Republicans in the 1982 elections could have swept Reagan from office in 1984.”

Reagan gave people a cozy, dependable feel. He was the model for the perfect grandfather that everyone knows they can go to for comfort and encouragement. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was a master at putting everyone at ease. No one who worked with him wanted to disappoint him. Though our oldest president in age, he brought an energy and a sense of infinite possibility to every speech he gave. Thinking of the speech he gave after the Challenger incident reminds me that he was also capable of expressing tenderness in a way that made all of us feel he was grieving with us. The fact that he was an actor did not contribute to his success as president as much as I believe the time he spent as a sports radio announcer. He had to think on his feet and developed a real sense of how best to keep people entertained while sitting behind that microphone.


Reagan behind the microphone

If he is the model for future presidents, then the role of president will have to change. In some ways maybe it already has. Reagan was not cerebral, but he had the same ability as his hero Franklin Roosevelt to communicate through more than just words, through inflections and pauses to convey a sense of well being in the face of calamity. Going forward I can see the people that a president surrounds himself will be ever more important. Scary to think of all those non-elected officials determining the course of our lives, but if we aren’t going to elect the most qualified to the highest office, then we will have to hope that the best and the brightest will continue to volunteer for public service.



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SERENA BY RON RASH

Serena by Ron Rash
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“A kind of annihilation, was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.”


Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence play the power couple in the 2015 movie.

George Pemberton brought back a wife from Boston. More than a wife, more of a force of nature as dangerous as a witch and as pretty as an angel. He feels stronger with her by his side, and though never a man lacking in confidence, that self-assurance is further emboldened by the Machiavellian counsel of his new wife. Before going to Boston to marry Serena, Pemberton fathered a child on a young girl named Rachel, a worker in the timber camp. When he returns after basking in the glow of his new wife, he can’t understand why he ever found Rachel attractive. In a place where women age quickly, her youth was her banner of attraction, but now he has Serena.

Rachel had a boy, the spitting image of Pemberton.

Rachel pays the price of her dalliances with Pemberton, not just with having an illegitimate child which seems potentially punishment enough, but by the condescending judgment of the other “Christian” women in the camp. What was she to do, tell him no? The women refuse to speak with her or even sit with her at lunch as if the taint of her sin could pass to them.
”She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day.”

It is really hard to like people sometimes.

On the other hand, it is very easy to like Rachel. If one zig or zag of life had went a different direction, most of those women spurning her could have found themselves in a similar circumstances or worse. Compassion is something we all need from time to time, and though some of our bad fortune may be left at our own doorstep, rarely is anything all our fault. Sometimes fate just shakes out a pair of snake eyes.

There is this moment where Rachel is out in the middle of nowhere, slightly astray, but temporarily free from the burden of anxiety. ”She looked at the stars and they brightened and dimmed in accord with her breathing, as if one hard puff might blow the whole lot of them out like candles.” So much of our life is spent just stumbling forward barely noticing what is in front of us, but because she stopped, even ever so briefly, and looked at the stars, Rachel brought the universe to the cusp of her lips. Maybe some of that was in the attraction Pemberton once felt for her.


The right pet for the lady that wants to be taken seriously.

Serena is almost mythological among the men of the timber camp. She rides around with an eagle perched on her arm. She sends the bird out to kill rattlesnakes to reduce the number of bitten workers. The men admire her, lust after her, and fear her. “He (George) suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.” Men who cross Pemberton or even men who get in his way start having mishaps. The Pembertons become richer and more powerful. In the backwoods of North Carolina, they can get away with...well...anything.

One good man isn’t enough to stand up to them. It takes a community, but this is 1929 and everyone is more afraid of losing their job than they are at stopping wickedness especially when the devil and his handmaiden have the keys to the gold.

Pemberton has a loose moral code. Well it’s not really much of a code per say as a philosophy of life. It is more of a what’s best for Pemberton code, and any soft edges he might have once possessed have been turned jagged with the steady influence of Serena. From the beginning, she seduces him with her sexual assurance and her focused intelligence. He has never met anyone like her, and fortunately for most of humanity, there are few like Serena.

As they get away with the worst of crimes, it only encourages them to do more. Every villain or villainess needs a henchman. When Galloway loses a hand, he expects to be sent down the road to a life of poverty and despair until Serena offers to keep him on the payroll as long as he is willing to do whatever she needs done.

He is understandably grateful, but there is only so much a man should sell of his soul to keep his place on this earth, and certainly Galloway decides to sell more than what any man should.

Pemberton is kept more and more in the dark as Serena clears a path for him. The swath she clears is not unlike the surface of the North Carolina hills after they are done harvesting trees. ”The valley and the ridges resembled the skinned hide of some large animal.”

When Serena loses a child and learns she can’t have more, she is upset for now there is someone who has given Pemberton what she can’t. She turns her thoughts to the child and the mother. Rachel has to run with the specter of the one armed man haunting her at every turn. ”Briars grabbed her legs and each time there was an instant she thought Galloway had her.”

Will Pemberton finally do something? Or is even this beyond his control? Is he willing to sacrifice his only offspring on the altar of Serena? Is this one time when God deigns to throw a glance at the workings of man or in this case... one woman?


George, there are things you can live with and there are even things that YOU can’t live with.

Uriah Heep is always the first villain of fiction that comes to my mind when I think of a character that gave me the most chills, but Ron Rash’s creation, Serena Pemberton, certainly goes on the list. We are all born with a natural need for self-preservation. We have varying degrees of things we are willing to do to save ourselves. This can even be applied to less immediately dire concerns, like bettering our position in a financial or social way. There is something feral about people like Serena who perceive all threats or nuisances as equally threatening, whether it be a true rival or just a person who has become less useful. We’ve come to accept ruthlessness in a certain kind of man, but we still find it jarring when a woman is the one capable of being so merciless.

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THE KIND WORTH KILLING BY PETER SWANSON

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

We are brought up to believe that murdering someone is the worst thing we could ever do, but is it? If a person is leaving a wide wake of broken hearts and battered spirits and in some cases much, much worse, is it really the worst thing we can do for all of humanity to give that person a nudge towards the afterlife? Of course the question remains, are any of us capable by ourselves of being the defense, the jury, the prosecution, and ultimately the judge?

When Ted Severson sees Brad Daggett, a man he has been paying an abundant amount of money to build his dream house, bend his wife, Miranda, over a table and have consensual sex with her, it sets off a string of events that...leads...to...murder.

At the very least Brad should have offered Ted a discount.

Okay, so the guy is banging your wife. She signed a prenup. That silly bitch isn’t getting one more thin dime out of you. You just need to go get drunk, maybe call up an old flame and have some unsatisfactory revenge sex, and call your lawyer in the morning.

Not Ted. He can drink like a fish, martinis in fact, line them up from here---------------to here, but mostly he just simmers on what he saw. He even tries to convince himself that what he saw wasn’t exactly what he saw. Brad was just trying to...nope... not even after six martinis can he convince himself that Brad was doing anything, but SHAGGING his wife.

Ted wasn’t sure what he was going to do until on a plane flight home he met The Lily Kintner. Maybe it is because she is beautiful and receptive to him, or maybe it is just because he has to tell someone and usually a stranger is much easier to spill your guts to than a friend. She doesn’t react the way he expects. In fact, she tells him that his wife sounds like the kind worth killing.

You’d never know to look at her, but Lily is an unusual young woman. She is a woman who doesn’t believe in letting people get away with things like infidelity or lying. She doesn’t believe in turning the other cheek or forgiveness. She realizes there is something missing in her, something different.

Her father is a reasonably famous author, and her mother an academic. Their household was a free-for-all of revolving parties with artists, writers, friends, and lovers of both her parents coming and going throughout her whole childhood. She was mostly left to her own devices, and when one young man took an interest in the thirteen year old with the flaming red hair and the long thin legs,...well...he annoyed her.

”I’d been waiting for two things since killing Chet. Waiting to get caught and waiting to feel bad. Neither had happened yet, and I knew that neither would.”

Now, it may seem like she is just a random stranger with a morbid sense of morality, but as the plot thickens we discover why Lily has taken an interest in Ted’s shattered marriage.

The chapters alternate between characters. We are allowed to see things from their perspectives and what is missing in one chapter can be revealed in the next. It all begins to really heat up when police officer Henry Kimball can’t let go of a hunch and begins to follow Lily. He adores her father’s writing, and after interviewing her a couple of times he is half in love with her, but dribs and drabs of loose ends from their conversations continue to nag at his consciousness. 2+2=3.75

There is a funny scene that I have to share that made me laugh because it reminded me of myself. Lily’s father has very distinct views of the ocean. ”He said it was like looking at death…. I love the beach, everything except the fucking sand, the fucking sun, and the fucking water.” Okay, it made me chuckle again writing it because it is so sacrosanct for anyone to ever say anything remotely negative about the ocean because everyone is so IN LOVE with water. I enjoy looking at the water. I can understand the attraction, but for me it is something to look at briefly and then move on to something more interesting. I have never really trusted large bodies of water. I wouldn’t say I’m suffering from Thalassophobia, but certainly I don’t feel the need to join the masses in venerating the ocean. I prefer solid terra firma under my feet... all the time... besides the water is such a slurry sludge pit of god knows what.

Killers become victims...victims become killers. Yet again Peter Swanson has delivered a neo-noir thriller that reminds me of some of the best of James Cain. There are twists and turns enough to leave your legs corkscrewed together by the time you reach the final page.

I also enjoyed his first book. The Girl with a Clock for a Heart Review

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THE WRIGHT BROTHERS BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first photo of flight snapped by a man who was taking his first picture ever. The Wright brothers were very careful to document each stage of their development not only with photography, but also with journals.


”The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Wilbur and Orville Wright

They were brothers.

As close as two peas in a pod and you could make it three with Katharine, the little sister who also at times provided the role of mother and first wife to flight. (neither brother ever married) There were two older Wright children, both boys who lead fairly normal decent lives. They grew up in a more traditional home with the mother and the father, but by the time the three younger children came along their mother was not alive to raise them, and their parson father was travelling extensively trying to build up followings in churches all across the nation.

Orville dropped out of high school to start his own newspaper. Wilbur soon joined him. It became the first of many alliances between the brothers, though claiming not to be very good at business, their resume shows something quite different. Despite how close they were their devotion to one another was not always based on harmony.

”Wilbur...believed in ‘a good scrap’. It brought out ‘new ways of looking at things,’ helped ‘round off the corners.’ It was characteristic of all his family, Wilbur said, to be able to see the weak points of anything. This was not always a ‘desirable quality.’ he added, ‘as it makes us too conservative for successful business men, and limits our friendships to a limited circle.’”

If you have strong family ties your need for an extended circle of friends certainly diminishes. Sometimes family does not provide friendship and many of us have to find that solace elsewhere. As I always told my kids it is better to have one really good friend than an extended circle of “friends”. Those “friends” may believe that they are your friends, but I’ve found when the chips are down those “friends” suddenly become “acquaintances” and sometimes very distantly so.

The Wright Brothers may have fought vigorously with each other, but each was a sounding board for the other to clarify their thinking. A good battle would often have them getting together the next morning with each brother switching to the other’s opinion creating yet another skirmish as they tried to prove the other right.

When the bicycle craze began, the brothers were on the leading edge by opening the first shop in Dayton to repair those bicycles. It wasn’t long before they decided they could make a better bike and in the basement of their shop they started making bikes to order. They named them Van Cleve (launched 1896), after an illustrious ancestor of theirs who helped settle Ohio. They were successful business men yet again.

Wilbur first turned his thoughts to flight. He may have followed Orville’s lead into the printing business, but this time Orville was following after Wilbur. It was a true partnership and like the Paul McCartney and John Lennon alliance they took equal credit for all that they created.

First in flight was plural. They flew!


Orville on the left was always a bit more dapper than Wilbur on the right. Here they are on the Wright Flyer 1 in 1910.

I’m not going to go into the trials and tribulations that lead to the first powered, controlled flight of an airplane on December 17th, 1903. You’ll have to read the book to find out those details. I will say I was surprised at the length of the process. I thought that after 1903 they were lauded and celebrated, but it actually took much longer than that for the world to take notice of exactly what they accomplished. The French showed much more interest than the American government which was a source of disappointing to the Wright Brothers. I do wonder if H. G. Wells, with his creatively conceived books of the future, was already contributing to the French fascination with flight.

In a reversal of roles from what I expected the Americans were sceptical while the French felt that anything was possible.

It was interesting to me that the venerated Samuel P. Langley of the Smithsonian was competing with the Wright Brothers. He had raised over $70,000 in funds to build his airplane. The Wright Brothers in comparison spent $1,000 building their airplane using only funds raised from profits from their bicycle shop. We do not celebrate Langley as the first to fly so you might be able to ascertain that his expensive prototype did not fly. As the Wright’s heard about the progress of their competitors it never bothered them. They had a vision of where they had to get to and never wavered from their intended course or worried about whether someone else would fly first.

”It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had faith.”

They built a concept out of a garage before America even had garages. If Steve Jobs were alive today and had read this book he would certainly have identified with the ability of the Wright Brothers to take an idea and refuse to let it go. One thing we know is that all over World there are people tinkering in their basements, garages, and on their living room floors. They are taking wisps of ideas and turning them into reality. As they drive to work, as they sit at a desk at work, as they turn a bolt on an assembly line, they are dreaming about contributing something new to humanity.


Walking in tandem.

The Wright Brothers did become wealthy, but certainly not as wealthy as they could have if they had been showmen or if money had really been the be all and end all of learning how a man can fly. They were focused on the HOW, fame and fortune would take care of itself. I couldn’t help but admire them and be inspired by their bred in the bone entrepreneurship that took them from a printing press to a bicycle shop to conquering the sky.

”On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 flyer.”


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GRAVE ERROR BY STEPHEN GREENLEAF...SAN FRANCISCO HARDBOILED

Grave Error by Stephen Greenleaf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”I just wanted to get away from it, the curse that Oxtail had cast upon everyone who lived there. That was where the guilt lay, with the town, with the collective consciousness that twisted and bent and spoiled and soured the people who had grown up with it, breathing its vapors. But they don’t put towns in jail. They probably should, but they don’t.”

John Marshall Tanner has been asked to investigate the celebrity reporter Roland Nelson by his rather attractive wife. Private eyes love it when good looking women come into their office needing the kind of help only they can provide. Marsh is no exception, except he has been around the block long enough to know better than to have his head turned by a few curves and a pair of nicely turned calves.

It doesn’t take more than a couple of days to figure out that what the wife suspects is not the problem. There is certainly deception, but the strings fanning out from that determination are twisted and knotted. The story is larger, more convoluted, but Marsh is about to put the case behind him because finding out the whole truth isn’t always what his clients want. When his best friend Harry Spring is found lying dead in a ditch with a double tap to the back of his head in the town of Oxtail...well Marsh is back in the middle of all of it.

When he discovers that Spring was working for Clair Nelson, the daughter of Roland Nelson, he starts to realize that the case he is about to wrap up is far from over and some of those strings leading to the truth have been cut or should I say bludgeoned, shot, stabbed.

Oxtail is a farming community outside of San Francisco. A town full of unfriendly, inbred, distrustful, defeated people. I had flashes of Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) from the movie Chinatown running in those orange groves trying to escape the range of shotguns being triggered by rednecks. Between the oppressive heat and the cloying smell of rotting produce, Marsh is wrapped up in a blanket of smothering despondency.

”There was nothing pretty about the Oxtail link in the chain of commerce. Foods that would look delicate and tasty in a fine restaurant were ugly and misshapen and seemed vaguely carnivorous while lying in giant storage bins or open truck trailers. The streets were littered with rotting vegetables fallen from careening trucks and the air was sharp with the smell of overripe fruit, the smell of things well past their prime. Things like me.”

Unsolved deaths from the past are encroaching on the present, creating more confusion and more speculation about exactly what got Harry Spring killed. The wild card whom Marsh most wants to put a finger on is Al Rodman, the boyfriend of Claire Nelson, a known thug with a local syndicate in San Francisco. Rodman’s involvement with the Nelson’s and his connections to Oxtail make him a prime candidate for murder, but as bodies keep piling up, it becomes more and more apparent that this case is not one case, but a series of unresolved events each swathed in layers of duplicity.

And of course there is a woman, not just any woman, but a woman that makes a man think about settling down with babies and a white picket fence. He might even get a real job.

”The woman was introduced as Sara Brooke, Roland Nelson’s chief assistant. Many beautiful women don’t wear too well up close. The features that knock you out from across the room often become incongruous on close inspection: the hair is too stiff, the lips too thin, the nostrils too flared or too crimped. Sara Brooke had just the opposite effect. You probably wouldn’t pick her out of the crowd at a cocktail party, but if you found yourself sitting next to her on a bar stool you wouldn’t leave until she did.”

As the case unspools and Marsh doggedly chases down each fragment of truth adding new pieces to the puzzle in his head, he starts to realize that truth is truly stranger than fiction.

”I told it. The words poured out like salt and I listened to them with the detachment of a critic. They were rational words, academic and sterile, as if murder and blackmail and two decades of rage were as traditional as nursery rhymes.”

You would think when I lived in San Francisco I would have read a few Stephen Greenleaf novels,, but it took reading The Mexican Tree Duck by James Crumley to finally convince me that I have been missing out by not adding Greenleaf to my hardboiled reading resume. Crumley extolled the virtues of having a Greenleaf novel on a stakeout or anytime the doldrums needed to be chased away by a dose of Raymond Chandler through the pen of a disciple. There is no shortage of clipped hardnosed prose. "The guy looked like a hood, anyhow. Drove a big black Chrysler, had a kind of flat face, like his old lady had been frightened by a frying pan when he was in the womb.”

The plot is an intricate, tangled mess that does straighten out as Marsh starts to make sense of the nonsensical. I even found myself exclaiming “No Way” after one such revelation. I must confess I do talk to my books from time to time. :-) This book is a classic example of a 1970s ode to Chandler.

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I bought this book from Canford Book Corral located in Freeville, New York.

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ICE BY ANNA KAVAN...A SLIPSTREAM POST-APOCALYPTIC NOVEL

Ice by Anna Kavan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”



Her hair was a blizzard, a shimmering cascade of pale luminous moonlight. She was fragile as if made of glass and crystal, built like a waif with pallid skin and bruised eyes. She is an ice sculpture carved out of a glacier that is shattered and reassembled time and time again. He needs her, desires her, craves her. He wants to clench the slender bones of her wrist and grip the gaunt thrust of her hip.

He finds her as the world is ending.

She belongs to another, but then he realizes that she is discontented. ”While she was happy I had dissociated myself, been outside the situation. Now I felt implicated, involved with her again.”

HE?

The unreliable narrator of this tale is suffering from daytime apparitions and nighttime terrors. The lurid concoctions of his agitated mind bleed certainty into the fantastical fooling, not only himself, but also this reader. He has seized his own deceptions and sees them for what they are, but understanding and containing them are two very different things. ”The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.”

Ice is advancing across the Earth. He has the means to save her or at least put off the inevitable.

He is chasing a wraith. He loses her and finds her again only to have her turn to smoke in his hands. He knows she is real though everything must be questioned. She hates him. She misses him. She expects him to save her as she bashes him with her animosity. When he dreams of her, she is dead.

”I felt I had been defrauded: I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds. I leaned forward and touched her cold skin.”

He has a rival.

A doppleganger.

The split half of himself who is assertive, brutal, and obsessively possessive, The Narrator refers to him as The Warden, but it is unclear exactly who he is. I have lingering doubts about The Warden’s identity. Is he separate from The Narrator or is he merely just another personality that he jumps to when he needs to be someone else? Someone who can control the girl. The one who can remind her of who she is.

”Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings, people or fjords and forests; it made no difference, in any case she could not escape. The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.”

She is a victim, but he is starting to understand that he is a victim too. In her presence, sometimes he becomes someone unacceptable. Her very delicacy, her fracturability makes him want to hurt her, makes him need to hurt her.

Kindness is something he learns too late.

The world is so disturbing because he knows it comes from within his own mind.

Bruce Sterling termed the phrase slipstream to describe this type of writing long after this novel was published. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." I knew after reading only a few pages that I was going to have to read this novel quickly, feverishly, if I had any chance of staying in the boat as I swirled without paddles through the mind of Anna Kavan. I put Franz Kafka in the boat with me, but he too is a fragile soul, and became sea sick with the changing directions of this twisted plot. There are Kafka moments, especially when The Narrator is dealing with a government bureaucracy that is becoming more and more detached as the world becomes smaller.


Anna Kavan was also a painter. This is her self-portrait.

Anna Kavan, AKA Helen Emily Woods, AKA Helen Ferguson, suffered from depression and heroin addiction. She was in and out of treatment centers her whole life. She attempted suicide, but survived each attempt. Many people believed that she passed away from an overdose in 1968, but she actually died from a heart attack. She burned all of her correspondence and her diaries before she died. This is truly unfortunate because I have a feeling that to most of us her diaries would be like trying to read Cumbric, but to a select few it would be like finding an extension of their own brain.

I can’t help thinking The Girl in this story is Anna Kavan. A fragile woman herself whom both men and women found to be attractive. Ultimately, The Girl in the story accepts her fate, and I tend to think that Kavan reached the same conclusions with her own life. She lived in seclusion. Though venerated by many writers, most of her work was published after her death. She was a lost girl who became a lost woman, incapable of escaping the ebb and flow of a mind that obviously saw the world differently. Like The Narrator, the barrier that most of us have between real life and fanciful thoughts must have been breached for her. Everything was real, and everything was imaginary. The disparity between one or the other is a hair's difference.

This novel is bleak and beautiful. Anna is so crafty and so lost; yet, so desperate to be found. I can already tell that I will never completely shake this novel off. I will remember the starkness of the trees, the desperate searching, the walls of ice, the escaping to be repossessed, and the nameless characters who together might form one being.

I purchased a first American hardcover edition of this book from Between the Covers Rare Books in New Jersey.

You can find more of my writing on my blog at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com .


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