Christopher Tuthill's Blog, page 7

The King of Dogwood Street, Chapter Two

As promised, here is chapter two of my novel, The King of Dogwood Street, a neighborly comedy of good, evil, and home improvement.

When we last saw our heroes, they were in conflict with a drunken neighbor Billy Joe, who was challenged by Rex, a strange newcomer. Enraged by his defeat, Billy sought vengeance in the form of petty vandalism.

In Chapter two, the police arrive to the scene of the crime, and Billy must fight both his own stupidity and his hangover to avoid charges. The rest of he neighborhood happily watches the drama unfold. Read on!

Chapter TwoDownload

If you missed the first chapter, it’s also uploaded on the blog for your reading enjoyment– please see the links below. If you enjoy it please share and let me and others know what you think.

Chapter 1, Part 2

https://christuthill.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/new-project/

Happy Labor Day

The Labor Day holiday invariably reminds me of my father, a shop steward and union rep for many years, who worked many long hours at a job he wasn’t crazy about to support his family. He always told me how important his union was, how lucky he was to have it at New York Telephone for forty years–his job supported us all (six kids) on one salary. This song reminds me a lot of him. He was a tireless man who still had time for kid activities, coaching, volunteering at the church and scouts, and too many other things to name. He was a great guy and I miss him.

Happy labor day to everyone, especially those of us working at jobs where we are perhaps underpaid or unappreciated. Your families understand–you’re what makes our country work.

Farewell, Summer

The end of summer is upon us. Sigh. I had a wonderful time, but it is always too short. I got to see some old friends, and spent plenty of time with my children, which is always endless fun. My oldest and I took a few long hikes in the Catskills, which is something I love to do more than almost anything in the world. We had family camping trips in Watkins Glen and in the Catskills and in Cooperstown, and all of them were memorable times we’ll always recall with fondness.

I got some reading and writing done, but not as much as I’d hoped or planned, and now with the semester beginning again there will be less time to do those things, unfortunately. I’ll be posting some reviews of things I read, including David Lindsay’s unique fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which was odd and engaging in the best ways. Played some great boardgames with my children, too.

I saw a few movies with my children, and also made the decision to cancel every streaming service I have. The only one that survived was PBS, and Amazon Video, which is included with Prime anyway. These things add up so quickly that our streaming bills were as bad as our cable box used to be, once upon a time. With all of the dvds and videos I own, plus all the free content out there, we’ll never lack for something to watch, and anyway I should spend any time I was watching television working on my book.

Speaking of which, there was also a near miss with a couple of publishers, but my new book is still without a home. I’ll keep at it in the querying trenches. One hybrid publisher seemed like a possibility but after my last experience with a small press I got cold feet at some of the contract details, and will just continue looking for representation or a publisher. This is no easy task, as everyone knows, and as authors I know are quick to tell me. But so it goes.

In the meantime, I’ll continue posting chapters of the new book here.

I’ll leave off with two photos of my son, Forest, a thoughtful, curious and all around wonderful lad, who has brought me nothing but pride and happiness. The first photo was ten years ago, and the second was a couple of weeks back. Both are at the same spot on a trail I love to hike as often as possible. It’s one of those magical, gorgeous places in the Catskills where I would live, if it were an option.

Time flies. Forest is a keen observer of nature, and on both hikes, as a one year old and as an eleven year old, he remarked often on all the beauty and natural drama we witnessed, from deer to eagles to bees and flowers. Remarkable boy, and I’m a lucky guy.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour” –Blake, from Auguries of Innocence, 1803

Time Enough at Last

One of my fondest, most primal memories of childhood is being up late in the summertime, reading a good book, while everyone else in our busy house was asleep. There were so many novels I enjoyed back then, and I read indiscriminately, for the pure joy of being lost in a fantastic new world.

There were many great series for young people back in the early 1980s, and I read many of them. The Hardy Boys, The Black Stallion, Matt Christopher’s sports stories, Encyclopedia Brown the boy detective, Danny Dunn, a boy wonder who created all kinds of machines with his pals, and on and on. There were some great works of literature too, like Madeline L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Detective, Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles, and others. Today I can see how much more sophisticated these last three are, but as a young boy I didn’t care about their literary merit, I just wanted to read.

To read as a nine year old meant getting lost in another world that seemed so real I became irritated when my mundane surroundings intruded. It meant an escape into magic and mystery and wonder, into past eras that seemed completely real, as if I were suddenly in a time machine, transported to colonial era America, or King Arthur’s Court. Perhaps I’d go to a distant strange planet, or an isolated pacific island, or any other a million different times and places. There was nothing so wonderful in the world as being lost in those pages, many millions of miles away from wherever I was and whatever was happening around me in my little corner of the world.

I’m now fifty, and very occasionally this magnificent feeling will come over me again when I’m reading a truly great, original book. It seems to happen less and less these days; perhaps that is a failure of imagination on my part, or perhaps it just happens with age. After you’ve read so many books, they cannot all have that glorious impact, and many of them will seem merely adequate. I’ll say that in the past few months, Ron Chernow’s Hamilton was a biography that transported me to the early days of America in a way that was quite breathtaking; I don’t normally read a lot of history, but he is such a fine writer, telling the story of the founder in such an empathetic way, that I was swept up in the drama of it and couldn’t wait to read more.

Novels are a different matter, and as I’ve read so many of them, it has become harder for me to find ones I truly love, that affect my outlook so dramatically, that can transport me in that same primal way. Susanna Clarke’s writing does that for me, and I recall a well-spent winter evening not long ago, when I was up through the night, finding revelations on every page of her incredible book, Piranesi, which I finished in one sitting. I can’t recommend her work highly enough, and I was ecstatic to learn she has a new novel arriving this fall.

In this hyper-connected age, it is increasingly difficult to shut out the outside world and enter the fortress of mystery and imagination that is a great reading experience. I read whenever I can, as much as I can, but with the demands of a job and a family it’s not always easy. I’ll stay up late at night when I’m not too tired, or read when I have downtime on the train or before the rest of my family is up. I guard my reading time jealously, just like when I was a boy, and get frustrated sometimes when there isn’t enough time or quiet for me to read every novel or work of history or criticism on my shelves. My collection is wide and varied–I have books on a great many topics, because I am never sure which one I will need at any given moment. This is one of the great things about being a librarian, as well: if I don’t have it on my shelves at home, I can almost certainly find what I need in the library.

I enjoy movies, though I’m not exactly a movie critic. I have found that films, television and video games don’t transport me the way a good book does. Maybe some people find the same elation and deep mystery watching things or playing video games, but it doesn’t happen for me. I can enjoy such media, but it won’t impact me in the same way, and while I don’t know for certain, I suspect that the effort required of a careful, thoughtful reader will always make the reward of reading that much greater. To me, it’s a bit like the difference between hiking to the top of a mountain and taking in the view, as opposed to having someone drive you up there on a paved road. (The same can be said for writing vs. AI-assisted writing, but that is the topic for some other post.)

One of the essential things about reading is the way it can change your perceptions, your outlook, your knowledge of the world, and perhaps even knowledge of yourself. The greatest works help us do this and will enrich your life in ways like nothing else. For me, reading a great book is one of the last bulwarks I have in guarding my mind from a ceaseless stream of meaningless junk that increasingly defines modern life.

The other night my young daughter, who is brilliant and perfect, happened upon the Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” with the great Burgess Meredith. I hesitated to show it to her, but she was eager to see it and I relented. At the end, she was in tears for Henry Bemis, the tortured man who lives through an atomic war only to be left utterly alone, despondent, bereft of all hope, sans spectacles. “I hate this,” she said. “He was finally able to read and now he can’t.” I felt like an awful father for having shown her the episode. We talked a bit about the message of the show but she was inconsolable, much like I was decades ago when I first saw it.

In these waning days of summer, I admit I feel some pressure to read what I haven’t from my list so far, but my task shall be Herculean. I have a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which I have never read and will likely not get to before the end of August. I have works by Saul Bellow, Robert Caro, Don DeLillo, Tim Powers, Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman, Octavia Butler, and too many others to list sitting on my shelves, waiting to be opened, calling to me, but time is running out. I’ll get to a few of them, and the rest will likely need to wait for winter break, or next summer, when I will have time enough at last.

Facebook is Terrible

Since 2006 or 2007, I’ve been on facebook, for better or worse. I was happy to reconnect with old friends, and make a few new ones. I built up an author page there, and helped run a conference page that had over 700 followers.

Last week, my account was compromised. Facebook locked the account, and has now suspended it. I have no way to get back into this account I’d built over the past 15 years. All the work that went into building up those pages is gone. Despite repeated attempts to contact the facebook help center, no one responds to my messages.

I know this is my own fault for dealing with facebook in the first place, but it was a convenient and easy way to connect with readers and those interested in the conference. However, facebook has deemed me in violation of their terms of service because of this hack, and that’s that. It feels a bit like Judge Dredd, quite draconian.

I guess I’ve learned not to try and build something like that again on facebook. I’ve created a new account to try and connect with friends and family again, but the platform is way too unreliable to use for a small business or educational site. Better to just stick to wordpress, where I at least have control over things.

Facebook’s many issues have been well known for years, yet many of us continue to use it out of convenience. However, with all the problems for users over the past months, they may be charting a path to irrelevance. Already, no young people I know use it. Give it a few more years and it’ll be like myspace or google+.

A shame all that work has disappeared into the ether, but so it goes.

Chapter 1, Part 2

In the opening of my new story, we met the denizens of Dogwood Street, a suburban neighborhood, including:

Billy Joe, a drunken reprobate

Simon, a professor

Rex, a strange newcomer who has moved into an abandoned house

Rex has arrived in the midst of Billy Joe’s noisy, drunken stupor, and put an end to it. In the next part of the story, the conflict is ramped up…read on!

Chapter 1, Part iiDownload

If you missed part one, here is the link.

Horizon

I found the first installment of Horizon to be an excellent epic Western, the kind of film that is rarely in theaters anymore. The movie is ambitious and sprawling, a tale that spans years and the lives of multiple characters in the settling of the western frontier. It’s not a sanitized version of that era, though there is plenty of drama. The cast is excellent, and the story is gripping. It’s long, and though it doesn’t move at a breakneck pace, it kept me interested the whole way through and I’m eager to see what comes next.

This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking movie, but that is ok. Westerns have a long and rich history in film and literature. The best of them, like Lonesome Dove, tell a story about America and about human nature that keeps us engaged and entertained. I felt that Horizon is up there with some of the better genre offerings. At the heart of this tale is Kevin Costner’s character, Hayes Ellison, who is the kind of stock figure we’ve seen in many Westerns—the tacit, reluctant hero. I was reminded of William Munny from Unforgiven, though Ellison is less brutal. He must protect a woman and young child from a band of outlaws seeking vengeance, and he does so almost grudgingly at first, like all good heroes, but once called into service he swings into action with the kind of cool performance moviegoers will appreciate.

Other plotlines include a group of settlers in over their heads, the target of a band of Apaches unhappy with the incursion on their territory. In one particularly grim scene, a band of outlaws looking to make easy money target a group of native women and children for their scalps; it’s easy money, at $100 a head. This is not the kind of thing you might have seen in a Western of an earlier era. It was a grisly sequence and underscores that there are really no heroes in this kind of story, though there is plenty of tension and conflict.

The film left me eager to see the remaining installments. I loved the scale of it—the film looks gorgeous, shot in Utah with stunning effect. A lot of care went into all of this—the story, yes, but also the sets and costumes, the languages of the native peoples—everything.

I’ve read some things about the poor box office performance of this film, which is a shame, because it’s a great movie. Perhaps it’s an old-fashioned kind of tale, from a bygone era of cinema. If so, that’s a sad development. There’s little enough at the multiplex for people to see that isn’t animated, or part of a comic book multiverse. Nothing wrong with those kinds of movies; my children love them. But it felt good to see a movie made for adults, which spoke a language of film that I haven’t seen for a while. If the days of these kinds of films have passed, because they require too much attention, that is a shame. Perhaps the audience for such films has shrunk so much that they are no longer profitable, the way it is becoming harder to sell good novels or good theater. If so, we will all be poorer for it. Even so, the measure of a work of art has little to do with how marketable it is. There are examples of this all through the history of art and literature. So, I’d urge you to go see Horizon—it’s a movie that in my opinion is worth the time and attention.

IF

I took my nine-year-old daughter to see IF, the recent movie with Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, and young Cailey Fleming as the lead. It’s a sweet story about imagination and growing up. I hadn’t read any reviews and knew nothing about it before going, but I knew what we were in for when there were scenes of some of the characters watching the Jimmy Stewart classic “Harvey,” about a man and his imaginary friend, a giant rabbit.

The film deftly handles some serious subjects, including the death of a parent and the serious illness of another. Normally, I would be worried that such a tale might be guilty of mawkishness, of overloading us with too much pathos, but this movie had such good humor and genial performances that it never veers into this kind of cheap emotion.

At the heart of this story is the idea that as we age, we leave behind childish things in our eagerness to become adults. The danger is that you can completely lose your imagination, your sense of wonder, all the things that make life worth living in the first place. The main character, twelve-year-old Bea, is starting to close herself off from a world of hurt after losing her mother; her father, played by Krasinski, becomes ill with a heart condition, leaving the young girl in a scary and vulnerable situation. She stays with her kindly grandmother, played by Fiona Shaw in another fine performance, and immediately lets grandma know she’s no longer a kid, and can deal with adult problems.

While worrying about her dad, Bea meets one of her grandmother’s neighbors, an eccentric man named Cal (Ryan Reynolds), who, she learns, lives with a variety of IFs, or ‘imaginary friends’ who have been abandoned by children who grew up and grew out of them. There is a giant purple monster that is on the advertising for the film, voiced by Steve Carrell, as well as a ballerina, a spy, a teddy bear, and a whole cast of whimsical characters in search of children to help. The problem is that adults, and even most children, cannot see these imaginary beings, no matter how hard the creatures try to get their attention.

This setup may sound a bit daft, but I found it a sweet story, and one that had some surprising depth. Every adult I know can use more of the things that the movie explores—fun, warmth, laughter, imagination, and everything else that children have in abundance and that most adults lose if they aren’t careful.

If the mark of a good YA story is that it keeps children engaged while also entertaining parents, IF does the job admirably. I would go as far as saying it was a moving story. My daughter loved it, and I thought it was great too, with excellent performances by all the cast, and enough comedy to lighten the tone from some more serious themes.

If you have a tween, be sure to take them to see this film. There are few movies like this, that tell an earnest tale with warmth and humor, and this is one that adults and kids can enjoy. Kudos to Krasinski, who also wrote and directed this film, it’s an excellent, heartfelt story.

Alexander Hamilton

There has been so much written on Hamilton that I can’t add a whole lot here, except to say that I would not delay on reading Ron Chernow’s masterful biography of the man. Just a brilliant book, combining voluminous research with engaging, lively writing. Hamilton’s life story lends itself to such an epic scope, and I can see why it has captivated so many. It’s not often someone rises from absolutely nothing to the highest levels of fame and power.

Whatever your thoughts on Hamilton, whatever you already know about him, I would give my highest recommendation to Chernow’s book. A few years back I read his Grant biography, which was a similar tour-de-force, and kept me so eager to read more, despite its massive size.

I’m looking for other summer things to read, and am eyeing Chernow’s Washington, which won the Pultizer in 2011. I may have to dive into that next. Such a fine writer, really doing a great public service by helping us better understand these early years of our country.

My summer reading list is large and always too ambitious. I have a few other big ones I might read, will have to see what strikes my fancy. But I was considering Pynchon’s Against the Day, which I’ve never read, as well as some other history books (I recently got Bruce Catton’s civil war trilogy) and a few fantasy novels. As always, there are so many great things to read, and so little time!

New Project

Here’s the start of something I’ve been working on for awhile. It was supposed to be out this fall, but my plans fell through, and I’ve been looking for a new publisher.

This one is a dark fantasy/comedy about a neighborhood gone bad. Think ‘The ‘Burbs’ meets Haunting of Hill House, with a touch of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’ll be sharing chapters of it here in the coming weeks.

If you enjoyed what you read, please comment and let me know, and share it.

And Happy Solstice!

Chapter One, Part iDownload