The Thin Red Line

Robert A. Heinlein

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Usually spoken as the acronym TANSTAAFL (pronounced Tan-staffle) it is the national motto of Luna, the Earth’s moon, which in the 2100’s is thriving as an independent nation-state. Dr. Richard Ames (aka Colonel Colin Campbell) is a resident of Golden Rule, a luxury space habitat orbiting Luna. While dining late one evening at one of the habitat’s classiest and priciest restaurants with Miss Gwen Novak (aka Hazel Stone), a man comes to their table and delivers a cryptic message. The mysterious messenger is immediately killed by a poison dart and is quickly and mysteriously whisked away by extraordinarily well-timed waiters.

So begins The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, my first exposure to the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. In the following 24 hours Campbell and Stone will fall in love, marry, disarm and kidnap a man sent to assassinate them, are evicted from their apartments on Golden Rule, accused of a murder and barely escape from the habitat, disguised as a Japanese woman and her samurai in a rent-a-wreck Spaceship from Hertz.

What appealed to me most about this book, at a time when I thought that I did not like science fiction, because I neither understood or appreciated the science in most science fiction, was that with Heinlein it never mattered. Heinlein was a master story teller and entertainer and his books were always written such that you neither had to know nor be able to understand the science behind the plot, although he always explained it. And the explanations were always easily understandable even to the non-scientist.

Suffice it to say that the newlywed’s marriage does not get any less zany or frantic in an adventure that will take them to the other end of the galaxy, several thousand years into the future and back and end ambiguously with them in a fight for their lives attempting to save a computer named Adam Selene, a computer said to have “woken up” and become sentient. If you enjoy a fast paced, comic adventure story this one is Highly Recommended.

Equally frenetic and comic in it’s way, Friday is the story of an artificial person or AP, named Marjorie Baldwin who works as a combat courier for a mysterious un-named quasi governmental espionage agency. Created in a laboratory from various genetic materials, artificial persons (”my father was a test tube, my mother was a gene knife”) are designed to be and in fact Are completely, beautifully, fully human. Exceptional intelligence, strength and other abilities enable them to do all sorts of otherwise impossible jobs. Because their unique and amazing abilities are resented, AP’s are often regarded as super-human or less-than-human and are widely reviled in society. Most hide their status and often claim to be orphans when asked about their parents.

Thus Heinlein is able to work in some pretty sophisticated social commentary on prejudice and discrimination without ever mentioning black vs white or any other real life examples of discrimination which might inflame animosities or make it appear that he was taking sides. This novel also provides examples of the types of plot and scenarios that earned Heinlein a reputation as a “sexual libertarian”– group marriages and casual promiscuity are presented in a tone that is clearly proscriptive rather than judgmental. This theme of sexual liberty would appear again in many other Heinlein works including Time Enough For Love and To Sail Beyond The Sunset. Highly Recommended.

Stranger in a Strange Land, widely regarded as a hippie “bible”, and considered by some of the free love generation as a religion or at least a life plan manual, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians after his human parents and the rest of their space exploration team perished. A subsequent space ship arrives and spirits the now fully grown off-spring back to earth and things quickly get antic in the classic Heinlein manner.

Due to a peculiarity in Earth’s inheritance laws and the terms of the contract under which the ship carrying his parents was sent to Mars, Mr. V. M. Smith is legally the owner of all mineral, development and other rights for Mars. The fact that Mars actually belongs to the Martians quite escapes the pompous governmental flunkies, business executives, slimy television preachers and reporters of every stripe who are all insistently drawn to the Man From Mars. He quite fails to understand what all of the fuss is about. You see, he thinks in Martian. And that makes quite a difference.

Brought from the returning space ship to a hospital to recover from space sickness and adjust to Earth’s much heavier gravity, Mike displays a number of extraordinary behaviors, such as slipping into a catatonic trance when nervous or excited. Spirited from the hospital by a kind-hearted nurse who sees the dangers implied by the many people desperately trying to sneak in to see her patient the two take refuge with one of Heinlein’s most memorable upper-middle aged male curmudgeons, Dr. Jubal Harshaw (who also appears in several other Heinlein novels).

In an extremely clever maneuver orchestrated by Harshaw, Smith appoints Joseph Douglass, Secretary General of the Federation of Free States, Earth’s de facto planet-wide government, as his agent, thus neutralizing the threat of his many sycophants and shifting it onto Douglass, who in a manner prescient of Ronald Reagan’s government run by Nancy and her astrologer is guided in all things by his wife Alice, the classic power behind the throne.

Thus shielded from the dangers of his exceptional wealth, Mike begins the process of learning human language and culture and does so at an astonishing rate. Mike consumes entire encyclopedias as quickly as most people read dime store novels. After a season of learning, Mike sets off with Jill, the nurse who spirited him from the hospital, and sets out to work as a sideshow magician with a traveling carnival. His Martian-taught ability to move, create and destroy matter by Thought (Martian’s find the exertion expended by humans to do such things physically strange and pitiable) enable him to produce some amazing effects but his lack of showmanship dooms the act to failure.

Learning from his mistakes and inspired by the lead preacher of The Fosterites, a religious sect that might be described as Mormons go Vegas, Mike earns a Divinity degree and starts his own church. He teaches his followers to speak, then read, then think in Martian and his church is a wild success, with rituals and practices that are at once familiar and utterly foreign to readers familiar with modern day Christianity. In a very Christ-like finale Mike marches unafraid into a pack of hostile rowdies who kill him. His followers retrieve his body and take it home to eat, thus closing the circle of life in the Martian way.

Stranger In A Strange Land introduced into the vernacular, “I am only an egg”, an expression of the individual’s insignificance in comparison to the group and of the long road of learning required to become an elder, which for a Martian means watching and learning from the world around him until so much is grokked that the next stage of growth is not just possible, it is inevitable. Which brings us finally to the word grok, Heinlein’s most unusual and enduring contribution to the language. Because I do not speak Martian, I do not yet grok grok. For me, waiting is not yet filled. If after reading the book, you too fail to grok grok, Wikipedia may be of some help. Highly recommended, particularly to anyone who ever was or ever wanted to be a hippie.

(c) 2007 Alan L. Jobe

Grateful thanks to JD whose encyclopedic knowledge of Heinlein and skillful editing allowed this post to be written in one third the time at double the quality.

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This post should make you afraid. Very afraid. Although if you are middle-aged or elderly AND white AND rich AND do not have children, you might be able to safely ignore it. Dale C. Carson is a former Miami police officer, former FBI agent and currently a criminal defense attorney. In Arrest-Proof Yourself he paints a very frightening picture of the current state of the criminal justice system, although not for the sorts of reasons you might expect.

According to Carson, violent and serious crime is down substantially due to mandatory sentencing laws such as ‘three strikes’ and police now actively enforce many laws that at one time would have been over-looked. Further he states that since the implementation of federalized criminal records databases the fact of an arrest, for anything, even if the charges are subsequently dismissed or you are acquitted of any wrong doing will follow you for life, no matter where you go. Where in an earlier era it would have been possible to get a clean start by moving away from the location where your criminal record remained on paper in a filing cabinet, you may find your career and other life opportunities severely restricted by the on-line arrest record that many employers will be able to view.

Carson goes on to state that while the police do a good job of catching serious criminals, they spend the vast bulk of their time enforcing misdemeanor laws, most often arresting poor and minority miscreants who pose no threat to the society and who’s minor mis-deeds would be more appropriately and economically handled as civil matters. He argues that this constant churning of the poor through the criminal justice system, which is largely paid for by the families of those arrested in the form of bail, attorney’s fees, fines and probation fees is the major reason for the persistence of poverty.

The bulk of the book is devoted to very specific advise on how to avoid contact with the police and what to say, do and not do if you do have contact with the police in order to minimize your chances of be arrested. Much of the advise is common sense and seemed both reasonable and obvious to me– drive the speed limit, don’t carry drugs, dress appropriately; if contacted by the police provide your name and offer your ID and then SHUT UP. Do not consent to a search of your vehicle.

Other parts of the advice seemed absurd but may in fact be appropriate: if you have a teenager who drives, Carson advises you to remove the back seat of the car, have the trunk lid welded shut and fill the glove compartment, cup holders, map holders and any other nooks and crannies in which drugs or other contraband might be hidden with a hardening foam and placing in the car a signed affidavit stating that you have altered the car in this way to insure that no drugs or contraband may be hidden in it and authorizing police to search the car, remove the foam and pop the trunk should they suspect that drugs or other contraband are hidden in the car. This struck me as way over the top, but honesty I don’t know. Fearfully Recommended.

In sharp contrast to the current day manual for surviving the criminal justice system that reads like a dystopian fantasy, today’s other book selection paints a very different picture of police work from an earlier era. Published in 1956, Cop Hater is the first of the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain (a pseudonym for Evan Hunter). This series revolves around the police detectives in a particular precinct in an un-named fictitious city which is evocative of New York. The series hook is that the precinct itself is the central character with different officers taking the lead roles in each volume and stepping into the background but still visible in other installments. The wildly successful series is up to 50 books at this writing with additional volumes forthcoming.

A fairly standard mystery in the standard police procedural format, the principle appeal of the book to me was the 1950’s milieu and the older, less technological workings of the investigations of genuine bad guys and the absence of the of the excessively bureaucratic harassment and abuse of harmless miscreants that figured so prominently in the Carson book. Recommended.

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A rainbow can be glimpsed through the Seattle Center fountain

The summer I was seven or eight years old my mother’s appendix burst and while she was in the hospital I was sent to Baton Rouge to stay for a few weeks with my Aunt Katherine and Uncle Bob. While most of the country was engrossed it the Watergate hearings that summer, my two passions were soaking in the kiddie pool my aunt set up on the patio and watching the new tv show Match Game every afternoon. And I’ve been a fan of Fannie Flagg ever since.

Most everyone is familiar with Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistlestop Cafe, which is wonderful and I was titillated to read of her affair with Rita Mae Brown in Brown’s memoir Rita Will, but it wasn’t until I started working for the library that I discovered some of her later books, which have become my favorites. Yesterday I happened to shelve Standing In The Rainbow , which is the story of Neighbor Dorothy of Elmwood, Missouri– a "radio homemaker" who broadcasts daily from her living room. Accompanied by her mother-in-law on the organ and with occasional interruptions from her son Bobby, who more or less grows up on the air, Dorothy Smith provides an intimate and chatty hour filled with recipe exchanges, domestic advice, and personal bits about her family. Over the years Neighbor Dorothy becomes a real friend to the women in her area who tune in faithfully every day. The novel is richly plotted and beautifully written. A wonderful read.

Can’t Wait To Get To Heaven is a sequel to Standing In The Rainbow that continues the story of the people in Elmwood, Missouri some years after Neighbor Dorothy’s death. This time the action centers around 80 year old Elner Shinfissle, who one morning falls off a ladder, is taken to the hospital and dies. We are alternately treated to short vignettes of various people reacting to the news of her passing and scenes in which Elner ascends into Heaven, where she meets her old friend Neighbor Dorothy. Dorothy and Elner have a wonderful visit, and then Dorothy gives her visitor a slice of most delicious cake and tells her she has to go home now. Elner then wakes up in the morgue and things really get wild. Quite possibly Flagg’s funniest yet.

A Redbird Christmas is a short and sweet novel about an elderly Chicago man, Oswald T. Campbell, who is advised by his doctor that his emphysema will not survive another Illinois winter and on a whim moves to Lost River, Alabama where he turns out to be the only eligible man in town and is soon awash in flirtatious blue haired ladies. Only about 130 pages, this one is a very easy read and real heart warmer.

Good news is the tooth ache has gone away again for now. Work was ok, but I was tired and grumpy. And then I couldn’t sleep and am up late blogging. Tomorrow is the annual all staff meeting for the county library system and then I will have to work a few hours at the branch afterwards. Happy Friday!

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Sunset falls as ferry crosses Eliot Bay

undated photograph by Joel Farmer

Today’s pic is for Ron, who admired the ferry pic I previously posted.

I confess that today’s books have all three been on my couch in varying stages of being read for a couple of weeks now and were not in my mind connected until Blog Rush advised that I could improve my click through rate with catchier headlines. My apologies to anyone who clicked through expecting a sensational story about a local government summarily executing exceptional jazz singers.

Compared to Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales, Tokyo Cancelled is a novel about delayed travelers entertaining each other by telling stories. A flight to Tokyo is diverted by weather and lands unexpectedly in an un-named city (presumably Delhi, India) where they find that an economic conference and the protests it has drawn have created a shortage of hotel rooms. Eventually all but thirteen of the planes passengers are dispatched to various accommodations when the remainder are told there are no more rooms to be had and settle in for a night in an airport lounge and begin telling each other stories to pass the time. The group of travelers proves to be from all over the world and each tells a very different story. The framework of this novel allows the author, Rana Dasgupta, to explore an unusually diverse range of ideas and settings, which he masterfully does, while never losing the believability of the ’stuck at the airport’ framework. A thanks to Cromley whose review first brought this one to my attention. Recommended.

I have never been a big fan of "self-help". While I firmly believe that each and every one of us must solve his own problems (if for no other reason than that nobody else is going to do it for you), I have rarely been a fan or a consumer of the mega industry of self-proclaimed experts with a sure fire scheme for resolving some problem or another they are convinced I have. Neither apparently has Jennifer Niesslein, whose Practically Perfect gently skewers a wide range of self-help gurus and movements. It reminded me a bit of Aunt Erma’s Cope Book, though in a very conversational tone that is evocative of a diary or journal rather than Bombeck’s laugh out loud wit. The book did not persuade me to try Real Simple or any of the other self help philosophies mentioned, but I am confident Niesslein never intended it to. Recommended.

Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams passed under my check-in scanner a couple of Sundays ago and caught my eye. I brought it home and read the introduction, which has a very "Drug War" tone and left me feeling the book would be more of the usual propaganda and set it aside, unread. Ron then picked it up and read it and liked it very much. He said that contrary to the impression I got from the introduction, this very readable history of prohibition in America clearly shows the lunacy and un-intended consequences that have flowed from our tragically flawed drug policies. He liked it very much and it is now back on my ‘to read’ pile. Jury still out on this one.

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Sunday was as expected a busy, hectic day. We are getting huge volumes of returns and have a lot of material backed up to be shelved. To make sure it was a completely sucky day, my hearing aid died at the beginning of the shift. The switch is broken and it will not turn on or off and regardless of the non-setting it constantly makes a deep pitched banging noise, which is usually the signal for a dying battery. Have to disconnect the battery to get it to be quiet. It always un-nerves me when I have to be out in public when my ear is out and I can’t hear at all.

And to top it all off, my toothache, which had been on hiatus is back tonight with a vengence, and I am out of the Vicodin my dentist gave me a couple of weeks ago. So for the first time ever on this job, I am calling in sick today and going to try to get my hearing aids fixed. Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and will hopefully get more pain meds and by Thursday will feel up to going back to work. Feh.

I finished reading Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. I was under-whelmed. Unlike in D*U*C*K, where she rhapsodized about the food a lot, there is little specific mention of the restaurant’s food as the protagonists are busy buying a rustic fishing camp in Shell Beach and consulting on a restaurant that is to be opened in a floating casino. Neither of these ideas much interested me, and I frequently found myself discovering that the characters are not at all as I had perceived them in the later book. (Notably I had gotten the distinct impression in D*U*C*K that Ricky and G-Man were black but in this book it is made clear they are white– that the characterizations in the later book were so poorly drawn that I could be left with such a big mis-perception is unfortunate.) I suppose sooner or later the two earlier books in this sequence will happen my way and I will probably read them, but I can’t say I enjoyed or recommend this book or this author.

I am also about half way through reading A Perfect Mess and am thoroughly enjoying it. Also about a third of the way through A Boy’s Life. Today’s illustration is of a metal advertising sign (Joel used to have a huge collection of these, including this one, which I sold off before I moved down here.) for a product which unfortunately I do not have, but it seemed topical

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Ron and I went out with a couple of friends to a Chinese buffet last night (I pigged out on the king crab legs among other things) and seeing table after table laid out with all kinds of wonderful food brought to mind Hungry Planet, an over-sized pictorial book that documents what thirty families in twenty-four countries eat in a week.

Each family is photographed with their weeks’ worth of groceries. It is a study in contrasts. From the family in a refugee camp in Chad shown sitting on a blanket with a few small bags of grain that are their ration from a relief organization to the North Carolina family who’s weekly haul includes two large pizzas and lots of fast food containers or the Greenland family who hunt the walrus, duck and polar bear featured prominently on their table. Each family is profiled and you get a real sense of who these people are and why they eat as they do. Interspersed with the family stories are essays by a number of other authors on such topics as “diabeasity” (a newly coined term for the closely related issues of diabetes and obesity that are becoming endemic throughout much of the world) and “nutrition conversion”, a term which refers to people whose health was previously threatened by not having enough to eat who now face the “diabeasity” problem from eating too much of the wrong things. The writing and photography are both excellent and this one is well worth picking up next time you are at the library.

It is only a coincidence that I happened to read Hungry Planet at the same time as Beggars And Choosers, but the themes mesh in an interesting way. A somewhat high brow science fiction novel set in the 2100’s, Beggars And Choosers portrays a United States radically transformed by genetic engineering. Physically striking and remarkably intelligent people, who are called “donkeys” live in high security enclaves where they pursue intellectually challenging occupations and pay heavy taxes, while the un-modified, who are called “Livers” are no longer expected to work at all– they are fed at cafes and obtain clothing and other necessities from warehouses, all of which are operated by robots and provided free of charge by politicians in return for votes. Then a small group of super-enhanced people, called “the sleepless” (they have been modified such that they no longer need to sleep, have very long life-spans and are so highly intelligent they make the donkeys look like livers) concoct an injectable substance that makes humans completely impervious to disease and able to transform sunlight and exposure to soil into glucose, such that they no longer need to eat (although they still can). The political fall out from this extraordinary development is quite surprising. Recommended.

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My two days off passed quickly if not productively. I did go to the dentist yesterday, for the first time in Years. My teeth need a Lot of work, but I am glad to have at least started on it. (My next of many appointments to come is on the 21st.) And the dentist did give me a scrip for Vicodin, which definitely helps. Ron did do a load of laundry yesterday, though not the big catch up of lotsa laundry I had planned. And maybe tomorrow I will manage to go get the haircut that was the other thing on my agenda.

After reading and blogging about the history of Moon Pies last week, this book caught my eye while shelving in New Fiction. Moon Pies and Movie Stars is a comic novel set in the 1970’s about Ruby Kinkade, a widow in Devine, Texas (pop 847) who runs the local bowling alley and is raising her daughter Violet’s two children after Violet mysteriously disappeared four years ago. One day Violet is spotted in a television commercial and Ruby and her sister Loralva set off in a Winnebago with Violet’s mother-in-law and the kids on a trek to Hollywood to find Violet.

The writing is at times quite funny, though the pacing is a bit off and the book seems to drag at times. There is a very time-warp feeling in the 1970’s details, and the Texas parochialism of the characters and their reactions to California is by turns amusing and off-putting. After waiting in line and appearing on The Price Is Right, where Loralva charms Bob Barker and the producers and ends up winning a new car, they do finally manage to find Violet and are disappointed that she has no interest in them or the children she left behind. In the end, I found myself thinking the book was in fact much like a Moon Pie– almost sickly sweet, but very little substance. Not recommended.

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So Thursday I got a message from Bev, who very kindly offered to lend me her copy. (Thank You, Bev!) Then when I got home from work on Friday Ron handed me my very own brand new copy of Deathly Hallows and my wait was at end. (I was up to 64th on the waiting list when I canceled my request on Sunday.) I started reading right away, stopped briefly when we had a visitor, then read all night. I finished Chapter 36 in the car Saturday morning the instant before I went in to work, then read the epilogue on my break around 11am. I have since re-read it most of the way through a second time.

I have nothing but good to say about Harry Potter. It has been such a pleasure these past six years to watch these kids grow up, and as I began reading I found myself thinking that Ms. Rowling has likewise really grown as a writer over the course of these seven books. I thought that the wedding scene early in the novel (where the evil old society biddy gossips savagely to horrified listeners too polite to stop her) was worthy of Jane Austen. (Ron gave me a very dirty look when I said that.)

I did not find that any of the spoiler information detracted from the experience in the least. When it was finished the outcome felt very much inevitable and could not have been otherwise. I found the story very emotionally gripping and admit that I cried at several points. And when it was over felt an enormous catharsis. Bravo. And now that I have recovered from HP fever, I hope to get back to reading other things and blogging about them regularly.

We had three people out sick today and it was an especially busy and hectic Monday at the library. I worked my ass off and will be happy to be off tomorrow and Wednesday. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon and got a confirmation from Group Health of my doctor assignment and will be able to make a doctor appointment tomorrow. Even when it’s a rough day, I love this job and am so thrilled to have insurance and benefits again.

Years ago when I was living in Boston, I was in a book store with my friend Billie and she handed me a copy of Boy’s Life and strongly encouraged me to buy it. I did and I loved it. It’s a coming of age tale set in rural Alabama. It is beautifully written and a wonderful read. I’ve no idea whatever became of that copy I bought all those years ago in Boston, but while shelving in fiction this afternoon I came across this book and knew I would have to check it out and re-read it. So I brought it home and added it to the stack and look forward to returning soon to Zephyr, Alabama and the life of young Cory Mackenson. And find myself wondering tonight how Billie is doing these days and if anyone has heard from her lately.

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Ron predicted that UW would examine Staci and send her right back home to Kathi’s and so they did. He talked to them on the phone. Clint got in okay and they will be here until Wednesday. We are planning to get together with them Tuesday, my next day off.

Work was the usual easy Sunday. I was amazed that most of the Harry Potters remained unclaimed on their cart in the back room. (I have also suffered from the temptation to go ahead and buy a copy, but new books are not in our budget so I have so far resisted, though who knows how long my resolve will last…)

I had not previously heard of Poppy Z. Brite, who apparently has written seven other novels, but I came across D*U*C*K the other day and was sufficiently intrigued to bring it home and read it. It is a very short novel (132 pages) about a gay black couple in New Orleans who are chefs and run a restaurant called Liquor, where they use booze in all the recipes. The plot centers around their experiences catering a banquet in Opelousas for an organization of duck hunters who are working to preserve the wetlands. Brite (who appears to be a petite white woman reminiscent of a porcelain doll in her jacket photo) writes with authority about New Orleans and restaurant kitchens, although at times her gay, black, male protagonists fail to ring true. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is in some ways an erotic love poem to New Orleans and its food. But given the extreme brevity and the $35 cover price (?!?!???!!!) I can’t recommend anyone go out and buy it.

Also, although this book is available from Pierce County Library, it is for some reason not listed in Worldcat, so there is no link to the book cover.

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Roux The Day is one of a series of seven Gourmet Detective mysteries by Peter King. The "Gourmet Detective" is a London-based foodie who works for chefs finding rare ingredients, recipes and substitutions. While on another case in Los Angeles he receives a telephone from a New Orleans attorney and agrees to stop over in The Big Easy on his way home to assist in authenticating and purchasing a "chef’s book"– a book of recipes and menu information for a particular restaurant which is up for auction in a local charity event.

The GD arrives at the auction to find that the book has already been sold, he is told to a New Orleans bookshop owner. The GD proceeds to the bookshop in hopes of getting the book, only to find a recently deceased man at the shop owner’s desk. The lawyer who hired him indicates that obtaining the book is paramount and offers a huge bonus if the book can be produced and authenticated. The GD is then "kidnapped" by a group of women chefs who call themselves "The Wiches" (for Women In Culinary & Hotel Employment).

As promising as the premise was, and much as I enjoy reading about New Orleans and the food there, I found this book difficult to get into. Though it is less than 250 pages it took me over a month of fits and starts. While the author seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of gastronomy, New Orleans seems to be just another backdrop for the protagonist to be presented against. And while there was much local trivia incorporated into the text, it failed to credibly draw up the city for me. I doubt I will try any of the other GD mysteries. (I also find it annoying that the gentleman’s name is never mentioned, forcing me to use the silly "Gourmet Detective" title over and over.

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Yesterday I worked a 3-9pm shift and was happy to find in my mailbox the copy of Michael Tolliver Lives that I had requested. I started reading on my lunch hour, then stayed up until three am finishing it, even though I am due back at work in a couple of hours to work my 8a–3:30pm shift. But I couldn’t put it down. It was so wonderful to return to the beloved characters we’ve followed since Tales of the City way back when and have not seen since Sure of You.

And while the changes they’ve experienced are striking (Thack is ancient history and Michael has an adoring husband half his age; Mrs. Madrigal, now in her 80’s, has sold the old apartment house on Barbary Lane and moved to a place with no stairs; and Shawna Hawkins is the a 25 year old author and proprietor of an internet site on sexual fetishes) the characters are still very much the people we’ve come to know. As always, Maupin provides a richly layered plot filled with luscious ironies and abundant humor. No spoilers from me, do go read it for yourself. My ass will no doubt be dragging at work tomorrow afternoon but I am thrilled to have been able to return for a few hours to a much beloved version of San Francisco that exists only in the pages of Maupin’s books.

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Max Barry’s Jennifer Government is a dystopian fantasy set in a not too distant future when corporations have come to totally dominate the life of the planet. People take on their employer’s name as their last name. (Children attend schools sponsored by corporations and take on the name of their school.) The Police are just another corporation out to make a buck. You can hire them to protect you or to commit mayhem or murder on your behalf but don’t expect them to show up for free. Taxes have been declared illegal and while there is a Government, it is not charged with upholding law, but solicits funding from the survivors of crime victims to fund investigations.

So it is that John Nike, marketing executive and his assistant, John Nike contract with Hack Nike to murder the first 10 customers to purchase their new $2500/pair sneakers in order to establish street cred. Frightened, Hack subcontracts the job to The Police who pass it along to the NRA. And Jennifer Government, the determined agent who used to be Corporate and has a strange bar code tattoo under her left eye succeeds in raising $200,000 dollars from the parents of Haley McDonalds, one of the teens killed at Nike Town, and sets out to get John Nike. A war ensues between the competing customer loyalty programs United Alliance and Shoppers Advantage and mayhem results.

While in some ways it reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the tone is much lighter and it is at times laugh out loud funny suggesting possibly that if Big Business rather than the Religious Right succeeds in grabbing the wheel and driving off the cliff the results may be more amusing if no less tragic. Happy Fourth!

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Basically I am just an over-grown kid and I love a circus. The Golden Age of the Circus, a richly illustrated oversized book that passed under my scanner yesterday is divided into three sections. The first details the history of the modern circus roughly from 1760 to World War II. The illustrations are fun but the text is a bit dry at times and I confess I didn’t read every word. The second section details the broad types of circus acts from the equestrian rosinback, liberty and voltige turns (acrobatics and dancing atop galloping horses, a troop of horses without riders performing in the ring, and a wild cavalry specialty with daring leaps and stunts, respectively), to the acrobats and tumblers, the equilibristes who walk or dance on the high wire or "tight rope", the aerialists who swing and leap from that "flying trapeeze", the joeys or clowns and the various exotic animal acts, lions and tigers and bears, oh my. The final section talks about the challenges faced by traditional circuses after WWII, about modern circuses from the still kicking Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey to the now ubiquitous Cirque du Soleil.

(more…)

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So I finally finished Crazy in Alabama. Loved it. Lucille, a frustrated and emotionally abused housewife in Cornelia Alabama finally gets fed up with her husband Chester and spikes his coffee with DeaCon rat poison. He keels over dead and she cuts his head off and puts in a Tupperware lettuce crisper, burping the seal to lock in freshness. Lucille dumps her four children at her mother’s house, and after showing Chester’s severed head to her nephew, Peter Joseph (PeeJoe) sets off for California where she has an appointment with an agent and a shot at a guest appearance on television. Her odyssey will take her to New Orleans, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chester’s head will be with her all the way.

Meanwhile back in Alabama the orphaned PeeJoe and his brother, Wiley , are displaced by Lucille’s brood and sent to live with their Uncle Dove at his funeral parlor, a crumbling mansion in the town of Industry, Alabama where he unwittingly wanders onto the cover of Life magazine and into the thick of the civil rights movement. Childress is frequently laugh out loud funny and the plot is filled with wonderful absurdities and numerous clever twists.

A couple of weeks ago, Bev posted a link to her very first blog entry. I clicked and was time-warped back to 2000 and found myself reading along and clicking next and at some point Bev mentions that Merrell urged her to read this book. Which is how I happened to put in a request and read it myself. Thanks to Bev and Merrell.

One more drive down to Eatonville tomorrow morning, one more drive back then I am thankfully OFF on Saturday before beginning my new gig Sunday. TGIF

 

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My intention to post about a different book every day has come to seem hopelessly optimistic. I have been temping at the libraries more or less full time and just have not found much time to read or blog lately. Next week I am working 6 days and have two interviews scheduled and am hoping the following week I will begin as a regular, benefited type.

Meanwhile I did get around to finishing Leaping To The Stars, and I liked it. The main characters did seem to continue to grow and develop and the adventure continued unabated, with another kidnapping, another secret plot and lots more surprises. I was much slower than Charles to trust Jmee again (she being the girl who had betrayed him and his family back in book one) and there were again times when the middle aged author rather than the juvenile character seemed to be speaking the long soliloquies, but overall the book works and it’s fun. And sometimes, that’s enough.

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When I started blogging I had said I was only going to write about new releases here. I realized a bit later that I meant new releases as libraries define them (we may consider a book "new" for up to two years at PCLS). But lately I have found myself reading a number of older books and realized that I have in fact been writing about a number of older titles and decided to explicitly abandon the new releases plan and just write about whatever I happen to be reading, which in this case is a novel from the 1980’s that I recently rediscovered.

The librarians have classified Metzger’s Dog as a mystery, but it isn’t really. When I was a bookstore clerk back in the 80’s we considered it general fiction, and while it has some elements of a thriller it really doesn’t fall into any sub-genre. A group of former mercenaries in Los Angeles learn that a pound of cocaine is being kept in a research lab at UCLA and set out to steal it. While doing so they serendipitously manage to steal a box of papers from another office, which happens to belong to a social science researcher who has done significant work for the CIA in "psyops". After selling the cocaine back to the dealer from whom the police had seized it in the first place, the gang gets around to reading the papers and slowly comes to realize what they have.

So their next step is to try to sell the papers back to the CIA. Much madness ensues and the book is at times laugh out loud funny. At one point, after the spooks have unsuccessfully tried to pull a double cross the gang decides to implement one of the plans to demonstrate they mean business. Carefully following the stolen script they sabotage a key phone company installation and stage spectacular collisions at 17 key freeway choke points, wrecking havoc in el lay. In the end, after a change of management at Langley the spooks cough up the money, the head mercenary marries his girl and the new CIA director and his wife attend the wedding.

I was disappointed that I really didn’t enjoy this book re-reading it in 2007 near as much as I had the first time around in 1980-something. Partly it’s that phones, airports and so much else have changed to the point that few of the exploits described could be pulled off today. Also, I think that my tastes have evolved a great deal over a quarter of a century and this book did not age well for me.

(Hoping to hear today about the job I interviewed for on Wednesday and looking forward to my Friday & Sunday weekend = working a full day in Eatonville Saturday.)

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So I finished the sequel to Jumping Off The Planet. And I liked it. If anything, the Heinlein influence is even stronger in this installment, particularly the concept of a computer "waking up" and becoming "sentient", which Heinlein examined at some length in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. But much as I would love to castigate Gerrold for "stealing the main ideas" or for being derivative, I honestly can’t. To some degree all literature builds on the body of work that has come before it and in this instance Gerrold quite appropriately uses some ideas that Heinlein played with as a jumping off point for a strikingly original tale.

The pace of this novel is much faster and I found myself really turning the pages to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, there were very few of the "inside" jokes this go round. He did manage to slip in the lovely phrase "that Sykes woman", but she is only briefly alluded to and makes no actual appearance in this book. Likewise the Georgia and Olivia characters are mentioned a few times but only in passing.

I did find myself thinking several times that much of the reflection and dialog attributed to the thirteen year old narrator was far beyond what could reasonably be believed of even the most precocious young teenager. At times even the older brother seemed to be speaking the words and thoughts of the sixty year old author, rather than what would seem reasonable for the seventeen year old character. In fairness, these flaws detract little from the story. Upon finishing the book, I promptly logged into the library catalog to request the final volume of the trilogy (which is not available at my branch). This is perhaps the strongest indication that I really liked it, much as I didn’t want to.

On a personal note, all fingers crossed today, please. I have an interview at 1pm for a position at the Dupont library branch and am hoping that this may be when I finally land the fully benefited regular position I have been aiming for.

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Happy Birthday to me. Forty-three today, egad. Working a longish shift at Eatonville library, blogging on my breaks, and contemplating growing older and growing up as I push my cart through the stacks. Wondering if perhaps maturity means learning to accept that human are confoundingly compex creatures and learning to celebrate what is good about each person even when what is bad is so glaring it knocks you over the head. This is not a strictly rhetorical excercise. I actually have a problem. Last night I finished reading David Gerrold’s Jumping Off The Planet. And I liked it.

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