Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 137

–Malcolm

Thomas-Jacob is a traditional publisher in Florida.

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Published on April 28, 2019 08:37

FEDS Announce Fix to Rising Seas Problem

Washington, D. C., April 27, 2019, Star-Gazer News Service – The U. S. Secretary of Ocean Waters and Rain (OWAR) announced here today that he has directed NASA and NOAA to partner in a “bold new program” to fix the problem of rising sea levels.

“While scientific theories approved by the federal government have yet to prove beyond a reasonable doubt why sea levels around the world are rising,” said OWAR chief Greg Gumo, “we know how to fix the problem whether it’s being caused by spurious global warming theories or the documented impact of more humans and animals peeing in the ocean.”

[image error]Gumo said that the idea dawned on him a few days ago when he was looking for extra space in the garage for his patent medicine collection. Departmental wordsmiths translated his musings into a new whitepaper called “All the Space We Need is Right Over our Heads.”

Regulations call for NOAA to transport 55-gallon drums of water–taken only from areas where the ocean is the highest–to Cape Canaveral where NASA will re-purpose Saturn V rockets and blast the extra seawater into deep space. The salt would be filtered out and sold to sea salt companies for use at fine restaurants.

According to OWAR scientists, most of the Earth’s excess sea water will be sent to to Mars, the moon, and other dry celestial objects that can benefit from the introduction of life-giving water.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO) suggests that the ALL THE SPACE WE NEED (ATSWN) program will be funded by a new toilet flush tax.

GAO spokesmen Jake Yourin said, “It hasn’t escaped our notice that sea level rise is a function of increasing populations, in short, the rise of the household and industrial wastewater. In the near future, those who pee will be those who pay.”

Number crunchers from several think tanks speculate that people can save money by drinking fewer liquids and flushing less. Meanwhile, drones and satellite imagery will ensure that people don’t start pissing in the woods

Gumo told reporters he expects both houses of Congress to fast-track and approve the enabling legislation since “nobody wants water getting into the basements of coastal hotels and condos even though those structures put pee in the ocean faster than some no-tell motel in Iowa.”

–

Story filed by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter.

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Published on April 27, 2019 08:29

Write what you know: but I’ve never been a bag lady

“BAG LADY: A poor woman, often homeless, who uses bags or shopping carts to transport her possessions and collect things that might be of use or traded for money.” – Urban Dictionary

Authors often joke about the feds tracking them down after they (the writers) use the Internet to learn how to kill people in various ways, break into banks, and commit other nefarious deeds for use in upcoming novels.

[image error]Yesterday, I looked at dozens of sites to learn more about bullet and arrow wounds. I found a wealth of information. So far, the police haven’t knocked on my door to talk to me about cold cases involving arrows in the ass.

Years ago, I asked a vet on a pet forum how much chocolate it would take to kill a large dog. Figured I’d get turned in ASPCA. I was surprised that we actually had a good discussion about it: he knew I was an author and not a nasty pet killer.

And then there the time I asked a forensic scientist what a dead lady would look like after she’d been buried for three months. He told me and asked for a copy of my book in which I gave him credit in the acknowledgements. Apparently, I didn’t sound crazy enough for him to suspect I was a grave robber.

It just goes to show, authors not only write what they know but write what they don’t.

So now the novel in progress has a bag lady in it. Needless to say, I’ve never been a bag lady. I once knew a lady that people in town thought was a bag lady. She looked like she was 150 years old (she wasn’t) and had the dried out look old people get who’ve smoked ten packs of cigarettes a week for 80 years. She was the cashier at a small grocery store. One time when the credit card reader was taking a long time, she asked that the screen was saying.

[image error]“Waiting for bag lady,” I said (because she bagged the groceries as she scanned them). “Most people around here think I’m a bag lady because I walk everywhere when my car won’t run which is near about always.” After that, she got ticked off if I didn’t come to her register or take her advice on my grocery buying habits. Seems like I saw her everywhere in town and about every time we’d stop to chat, somebody would ask me a few days later why I was talking to “that old bag lady.” I told people she was giving me brokerage tips.

She’s long gone now, but I think of her as I try to come up with what the bag lady in my new novel will look like and act like. Whenever I have a female character in a novel, I have to ask my wife what kind of clothes she’d wear. I’m aware that women wear clothes, but I have no idea what any of the clothes are called or what for what occasions they’d be appropriate. My wife can’t help me as much this time out because my 1950s bag lady is wearing clothes from the mid-1940s.

Government restrictions seriously impacted the clothing people could buy. My wife wasn’t around then, so I’me learning about color and fabric restrictions, knitting socks for troops, and the no-nonsense styles men and women wore then on line. Even Mrs. Roosevelt was purportedly knitting socks for the war effort. Needless to say, my bag lady doesn’t look like the lady on the cover of that sheet music.

If there’s a crime spree in your neighborhood targeting bag ladies, I have an alibi–enough browser history to prove I’m here in my den doing research.

–Malcolm

[image error]Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the recently released short story collection “Widely Scattered Ghosts.”

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Published on April 26, 2019 11:34

National Poetry Month: Harjo Wins Jackson Poetry Prize

“New York, NY – April 25, 2019 – Joy Harjo has won the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize. The prize, endowed by John and Susan Jackson, is awarded annually by Poets & Writers to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition. It carries a significant monetary award, increased this year to $65,000, and aims to provide what poets need: time and encouragement to write.”

Source: JOY HARJO WINS JACKSON POETRY PRIZE | Poets & Writers

Best of news. Of course, I’m biased. She’s one of my favorite current poets, mentioned here earlier this month

–Malcolm

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Published on April 25, 2019 10:33

There ought to be a law against slide show “news”

If you get most of your “news” from Yahoo and Facebook, you’re a slide show victim waiting to happen. They usually begin with a headline like this:

Here’s the scene that got “I Dream of Jeannie” cancelled.
So an so was famous and had billions. See how they’re living now.
What’s her face was really hot 25 years ago. See what she looks like today.

The answer to any of those questions might not fit on a postage stamp, but it will fit on a 3X5 card.

Instead, you’re “treated to a slide show,” the first page of which has nothing to do with the headline you clicked on. Let’s say you clicked on So an so was famous and had billions. See how they’re living now. Lately, Yahoo has been using Sean Connery as click bait. Instead of seeing Sean Connery, you see some other actor on a page filled with pop-up ads and a graphic called “Next slide.”

As you click “Next slide,” you realize that you’re going to have to wade through 49 other slides before you come to Sean Connery, “I Dream of Jeannie,” or the hot actress from 1994.

Click on this graphic if you have had the joy of the slide show experience:

OR:

The bad news is, these slides load at a snail’s pace unless you bought the latest hot computer 25 minutes ago.

The worst news is, the slide shows paint in on the screen in such a jerky fashion, it’s easy to click on an advertisement by mistake and get shunted off onto a site telling you how to get hot Russian wives.

Seems like we ought to be able to sue, or even kill, somebody for this bait-and-switch game because these slide shows are almost as annoying as the real slide shows years ago when we went over to friends’ houses for dinner and they hauled out a Carousel projector with 100000000 vacation slides.

Or, maybe if we can’t beat them, we should join them. I’ve got a lot of boxes of vacation slides in the closet that will give me a head start in something like:

Malcolm Shows You Where to Find the Best Hookers.

or

How To Find Hit Men Who Don’t Like Slide Show Creators.

I suggest that you don’t run both of these at the same time.

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Published on April 24, 2019 11:20

Review: ‘Line of Sight,’ a Jack Ryan Jr. Novel

Line of Sight by Mike Maden

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jack Ryan, now President of the United States, and his son, Jack Ryan, Jr., analyst and black ops specialist at “The Campus,” are enduring characters in the Tom Clancey series ever since “The Hunt for Red October” appeared in 1984. As fans know, the series has been written by other authors since Clancey’s death.

Mike Maden, the author of “Line of Sight,” has written a fair number of the books sharing the series with Mark Greaney and others in what has been an amazingly consistent run of political action thrillers that has maintained the Clancey Style, fast-paced plots, and love of military equipment. Fans of the series will appreciate the tangled plot in this yarn that focuses on Jack Ryan, Jr. as he goes to Bosnia look for a former patient of his mother (Cathy Ryan) who saved the girl’s sight and then lost track of her.

Other forces are, of course, at play, including terrorists who want to destabilize Bosnia’s fragile peace and an international crime organization that has placed “kill orders” on several people, including Jack. Unaware of either group, Jack focuses on tracking down Dr. Cathy Ryan’s former patient and friend Aida Curić. The disparate subplots of this story turn toward each other like an impending train wreck as other members of The Campus become involved in minor roles.

The weakness of the book comes from the fact that the subplots need time to develop and while they are brewing, the reader is treated to lengthy travelogue sections for entertaining Jack with others or alone. Every tourist destination but the kitchen sink in the surrounding area becomes a sightseeing stop, interspersed with a love interest that, while well handled, doesn’t reduce the author’s reliance on in-country experience and/or Internet research to pad out the story. Potentially, 25% of the text is the kind of travel and historical information we usually get in a Dan Brown novel.

The book reads well, especially if one skims the travel sections, and in spite of those sections, the conclusion doesn’t disappoint.

View all my reviews

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Published on April 23, 2019 09:48

Wow, new followers

WordPress keeps sending me notices that more and more people are following this blog. That’s a little scary because it means I can’t slack off and write these posts drunk and blindfolded. Thank you!

While many of my posts do sound drunk and blindfolded, I also have fun reviewing a few books, talking about authors, and occasionally saying a few things about writing. Yet, I have madness in my method and that is something that I believe needs to be said. I say it in fiction. This Facebook cover picture pretty well sums it up:

My publisher is working on a new edition. She just sent me photographs of it this morning. Wow, for a grey and rainy day, they really make me happy. You’re going to like it. More on that later, of course.

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Published on April 20, 2019 07:10

Too many darned doctors’ appointments

Some authors can write while on a sinking ship or as bombs fall outside their windows. I’m not that kind of person.

No, things aren’t quite that bad–other than too much rain and grass too high to mow–but the things that are happening and are disruptive enough to make it difficult to write.

Sure, at my age (and my wife’s age) one should expect more doctors’ appointments. They fill up the calendar sometimes and often get scheduled on top of each other by offices that unilaterally select appointment times, send out an e-mail, and don’t worry about the fact their appointment conflicts with something already on the calendar.

[image error]

Where one fears they’ll end up.

To some extent, many these appointments have to do with teeth that must be cleaned by a hygienist, old eyes that need prescriptions, and hearing problems that need magical hearing aids. Then there’s the usual sciatica and arthritis.

My wife was in several car wrecks (not her fault) some years ago, and the lack of compensation by the perpetrators’ insurance companies then leads to long term problems. The laws keep getting tighter, so that means more appointments so the doctor can say s/he saw us and can keep writing the same prescription one or the other of us has needed for years.

Several years ago, I had cancer surgery. It was a success. No chemo or radiation follow-up was needed. Today I learned that I might be facing something like that again. I’m pissed off about it because some test results last fall weren’t the best, but I was led to believe a wait-and-see approach was best. Now the test results are worse. So, that means more doctors’ appointments and worries.

I’m not a big fan of doctors, hospitals, regulations about the hoops one has to go through to get medications, and all that. I think “they” sense that my trust is always guarded. They think I should kowtow to them and I won’t do it. Yet, I wish I could hypnotize myself to move ahead normally until the next appointment without dwelling on all the possibilities that could occur after the new test results.

At least I could get some writing done rather than letting my imagination run wild about all the worst scenarios.

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Published on April 19, 2019 12:48

Seriously, a long title is nothing to be scared of

Several great titles come to mind:

[image error]Tom Wolfe’s 1965 collection of essays The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby The story originally appeared in Esquire Magazine in 1963.

Gloria Sawai’s short story “The Day I Sat With Jesus on the Sun Deck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts” in her 2002 short story collection A Song for Nettie Johnson The story originally appeared in 1976.

Peter Weiss’ 2001 play “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.”

David Rakoff’s 2006 satire (with a bite) Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems.

[image error] Having said that, here’s a bit of shameless promotion from your sponsor (AKA, me)

My 2017 Kindle short story “En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill While the Dogwoods Were in Bloom” has a long title. But it reads fast, is satirical (with a bite), and is based on Florida folklore about a magical sound called Diddy-Wah-Diddy. The place was hard to find, but if you did find it, you could eat all you wanted to eat.

My re-telling takes a lot of liberties with the original because, well, I felt like setting it in modern times and made it about a junk food junkie obsessed with finding the town and providing it is real.

I don’t advise looking for it, but if you happen to find it, let the rest of us know where it is.

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Published on April 17, 2019 10:07

Briefly Noted: ‘Le Mystère des Cathédrales’

[image error]With yesterday’s catastrophic fire at Notre-Dame of Paris, I couldn’t help but think of Victor Hugo’s comment in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) that “The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.”

Tourists, Catholics and other Christians, mystics of all faiths, architects, and especially the French nation have used many superlatives to describe the beauty and importance of this cathedral. And yet, the church is more than it seems. It is, as the pseudonymous author Fucanelli wrote in the original version of The Mystery of the Cathedrals, a veritable hermetic textbook in living stone to the alchemical process.

Most people probably view the hermetic symbols as the flourishes of Gothic architecture. However, for students of chemical or spiritual alchemy, the is much to learn from those symbols as well as from The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1926) and its sequel Dwellings of the Philosophers (1929). Modern-day students will find a great deal of help in the work of Carl Jung and others who view alchemy as more than trying to turn lead into gold but as a spiritual/psychological means of becoming wholly one’s divine self.

[image error]I have been studying this book since the 1971 English (U.K – Neville Spearman edition) came out and grasp only a fraction of it. As Wikipedia says of the two books, “The books are written in a cryptic and erudite manner, replete with Latin and Greek puns, alchemical symbolism, double entendres, and lectures on and in Argot and Cant, all of which serve to keep casual readers ignorant.”

From the Publisher (The cover shown here comes from a reprint edition.)

In 1926 the fabled alchemist Fulcanelli left his remarkable manuscript concerning the Hermetic Study of Gothic Cathedral Construction with a student. He then disappeared. The book decodes the symbology found upon and within the Gothic Cathedrals of Europe which have openly displayed the secrets of alchemy for 700 years.

From the Book

“The gothic cathedral, that sanctuary of Tradition, Science and Art, should not be regarded as a work dedicated solely to the glory of Christianity, but rather as a vast concretion of ideas, of tendencies, of popular beliefs; a perfect whole, to which we can refer without fear, whenever we would penetrate the religious, secular, philosophic or social thoughts of our ancestors.”

Amazon Reader Review
[image error]

Wikipedia Photo of 2019 fire

Seminal work by the mysterious master French alchemist Fulcanelli. Companion to his other book “The Dwellings of the Philosophers.” The author explores in depth secrets contained within the Gothic cathedrals of France. He reveals a number of secrets, providing crucial clues into the occult work of the alchemists, contained in these massive repositories of knowledge preserved in stone. Warning: this is not a work for the uninitiated or those unfamiliar with alchemy. In order to understand this book, one must have at the very least knowledge of Gothic art and architecture as well as an understanding of the rudiments of alchemy. This is necessary in order for Fulcanelli’s work to make any sense to the reader. I would recommend Loius Charpentier’s “Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” and Tobias Churton’s “The Golden Builders” to familiarize oneself with the subject matter before diving headlong into Fulcanelli’s masterpiece.

I agree with the reviewer’s suggestions about reading several other books first before attempting this one. Also, you’ll find an interesting commentary of Mysteries of the Cathedrals included in Jay Widner and Vincent Bridges book The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye” Alchemy and the End of Time.

In spite of the difficulties, Mysteries of the Cathedrals is time well spent.