Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 166
January 28, 2018
Sunday’s Scatterings
Like the hash browns at Waffle House, my thoughts are often scattered and smothered.
Today’s rain and seriously cloudy skies have impacted the light. The inside of the house is darker than it should be at 3:30 p.m. I start wondering if I missed dinner. The cats are certain they missed dinner. Plus, it feels colder in the house even if the thermostat in the hall tells me it really isn’t.
[image error] A writer friend on Facebook typically asks what we’re reading during the weekend. For weeks, I was re-reading Les Misérables. I ended up with a standard reply to her post, “Yep, still reading Victor Hugo.” Now, it’s “Yep, still reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.” It’s over 900 pages and, while fascinating, it’s not a beach read. I’m a little embarrassed by the fact the book has been out so long and I’m just now reading it. I saw the 2012 film first, and started thinking about the book. Ended up getting it as a Christmas gift.
[image error]I wonder if anyone reads history books any more. Well, I suppose they do, or publishers wouldn’t keep releasing them. Yet, as with my review of American Trinity, the response here and on Facebook is always slim to none. In a way, that’s kind of sad, for I see so many heated political arguments on line, I begin to think people believe the world was born the day they were born. Their flip solutions to today’s problems make it obvious they haven’t read about what led up to the world as it is now.
[image error]I’m happy to see that my friend and colleague at Thomas-Jacob Publishing, Smoky Zeidel, is coming out with a new book of poems. I think the release date is March 1. I’ve been so slow writing the third volume in my Florida Folk Magic series (Lena) that it helps seeing that Smoky, and Robert Hays ( A Shallow River of Mercy ), have been more focused than I have been during the rainy winter months.
Okay, I’ve dawdled around with this post for so long that the cats’ dinner time has now arrived. This means they’ve stopped standing on my desk trying to suggest that I’ve forgotten something.
[image error] Those of you who follow me on Facebook (and if you’re not, you should be), know that my wife makes lots of quilts and that I watch old movies in the sewing room (along with the cats) while she’s at her 1949 Singer sewing machine creating works of art out of fabric. I’ve been referring to these movies as our “quilting movies.” We just finished “Sweet Bird of Youth” (happier than the play–if it’s possible for anything by Tennessee Williams to be cheery), and have now moved on to one of those “it’s a real hoot” movies, “Libeled Lady.” Wikipedia refers to it as “a 1936 screwball comedy film starring Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Spencer Tracy.” And it is seriously screwball.
And on a more mundane note, what with it being dark and rainy and not yet time to watch the rest of the Jean Harlow movie, I think I’ll go fix comfort food for dinner: Mac & Cheese. And, no, I don’t make it from scratch like my mother did.
I hope you’re having a great weekend, reading important books, finding the impossible dream, saving the world, &c.
January 26, 2018
‘American Trinity’ – Devastating perspectives about how the West was won
American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, and the Spirit of the West, by Larry Len Peterson, Sweetgrass Books (August 1, 2017), 728 pages.
How did we “win” the west?
[image error]Our legends, movies, and novels present derring-do accounts of triumphs over a wondrous, yet dangerous environment; perseverance against inhospitable weather; heroic families and individuals undergoing multiple hardships in a search for the promised land; and surviving battles with rustlers, gunslingers and Indians.
Our high school history books presented Manifest Destiny as the the holy grail of America’s consciousness facilitated by soldiers, missionaries, and heroes who–sanctioned by reason, wisdom, and the Almighty–kicked the snakes out of Eden and made it accessible to pioneers, family farms, and continental commerce.
The focus of this well-researched, scholarly and accessible book comes from Peterson’s statement in the preface: “I have been haunted by the question: who were we and who are we as Americans and a nation? I believe a nation is defined by the people who create its history, and they are remembered by the authors who write their biographies. Reflecting on that era and all its symbolic meaning, I’ve wrestled with explanations to make sense of why the Indian’s way of life was destroyed and what authority justified it.”
The short answers to “what authority justified it,” which are presented in his broad-in-scope book that carries readers deep into the past for information, are religion, disease, the principles of the Enlightenment, European colonization, Social Darwinism, and military force.
American Trinity was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2017 by True West magazine.
From the Publisher: “American Trinity is for everyone who loves the American West and wants to learn more about the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is a sprawling story with a scholarly approach in method but accessible in manner. In this innovative examination, Dr. Larry Len Peterson explores the origins, development, and consequences of hatred and racism from the time modern humans left Africa 100,000 years ago to the forced placement of Indian children on off-reservation schools far from home in the late 1800s. Along the way, dozens of notable individuals and cultures are profiled. Many historical events turned on the lives of legendary Americans like the “Father of the West” Thomas Jefferson, and the “Son of the West” George Armstrong Custer – two strange companions who shared an unshakable sense of their own skills – as their interpretation of truths motivated them in the winning of the West.”
From reviewer Stuart Rosebook, “Truewest Magazine”: “Readers will quickly discover that the strength of Peterson’s American Trinity’s is in the depth of his research and personal introspection throughout his 725-page book. As Peterson states in his Preface & Acknowledgments: “The American Trinity is older and bigger than the American West. It is the story of the grand sweep of human experiences and their eventual influence on white racist attitudes toward Native Americans. History is important. When there is no knowledge of the past, there cannot be a vision of the future.”
Peterson, in the words of his editor, writes Jim Cornelius in “Frontier Partisans,” set out to “challenge views without demanding that you change yours.” He is not grinding an ideological ax – but he is facing up to some difficult history. A man of deep faith, Peterson wrestles with the role religion played in justifying conquest and the stripping of culture away from native peoples. A doctor and a man of science, he grapples with the use of ‘scientific racism’ to rationalize oppression.”
We think we know the west from watching “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke” and “How the West Was Won.” The reality of the west and why we were drawn there as a young nation is much deeper and wider than TV serials and movies suggest. That reality not only prompts us to ask our ancestors “what were you thinking?” but prompts us to reassess what we’re thinking now.
January 24, 2018
Dang, another singing telegram to deliver
Those of us who delivered Western Union telegrams on our bicycles occasionally got stuck with a singing telegram: usually “Happy Birthday.” While Western Union, mostly associated these days with transferring money, brought back the service in in 2011, telegrams as they had been known for many years cased in 2006.
[image error]I delivered telegrams in the 1960s when the service was still in demand due to the high prices of long distance calls in those days. There were Candygrammes, of course, and messages that required WU to sing. Frankly, I preferred it when the telegraphers at the local office–who looked like character actors out of “Medicine Woman” or “Gunsmoke” or “High Noon”–gathered around a telephone and sang “Happy Birthday” to the person receiving the message.
I didn’t care for singing telegrams when I had to deliver one, stand there on the doorstep, and sing “Happy Birthday” to the recipient. Oddly enough, I got more applause in African American neighborhoods than White Neighborhoods because: (a) I was the only white boy who ever came there, and (b) because I was signing on somebody’s front porch to a growing audience of neighborhoods.
They liked my spunk, I think, for pretending to be able to sing. My singing has always been marginal, and I think the telegram’s recipient (and all those in adjoining houses) always knew that. But I gave it a shot and, over time, was more or less a fixture of the neighborhood on my old three-speed bike and my yellow Western Union badge.
Those who seldom got telegrams assumed they brought bad news. I enjoyed handing over a Candygram because it wasn’t a frightening thing. Singing, I could do without. When the telegram brought bad news, I was often asked to read it and sometimes write down the recipient’s reply. Those intensely personal encounters with strangers were almost too intense to carry home at the end of my shift.
I was a ham radio operator in those days and wished most of those getting telegrams would communicate with their family and friends directly and leave me out of the loop–especially when the news wasn’t good. Plus, Morris code was so much easier than signing for those of us who were tone deaf.
January 22, 2018
If you were God, what would you do next?
Most people are scared to answer that question. In fact, they’re down right superstitious about even hearing the question.
Those who do answer the question tend to say either: (a) I would smite so and so, or (b) I would create world peace. Smiting a bad guy is easy. Creating world peace is easier said than done because there are too many variables involved for a mere human to deal with.
Okay, here’s where you find out that’s a trick question.
[image error]Those who aren’t writers often say that within any given novel, the author is a god. S/he can smite everyone who needs smiting and decree world peace without having to worry about the mechanics of it.
There are risks of acting too God like while writing a novel or a short story. Presumably, God (Himself and/or Herself) doesn’t have to worry about bad press whenever He or She manifests and Act of God. Human beings, being what they are, tend to believe that if an Act of God occurs and it’s bad, it must be their fault. They sinned, and so an Act of God paid them back.
If a writer puts an Act of God into his/her story, chances are nobody will believe it and the author will be paid back with a slew of one-star reviews on Amazon, and God help him or her if the book sells well enough to attract the attention of critics who will say, “The book was a wondrous sweeping saga until the last chapter when the good guys were trapped and suddenly–without warning or proper foreshadowing–a tsunami kills all the bad guys.”
Critics and readers alike will say, “I hate it when that happens.”
Basically, critics and readers don’t want the author to play God as s/he writes because the resulting story is unsatisfying, outside the reality of the novel, an example of the author writing himself/herself into a hole and cheating to get out of it, and other nasty criticisms.
Readers, frankly, are never willing to say that the author moves in mysterious ways and let it go at that. Authors who move in mysterious ways are variously bad, experimental, sinful, crazy, or tetched. Critics and readers typically want more order than authors want. They want the books they read to be safe and to fit within the world as they see it.
The bottom line is, the author can’t play God and has to let the story unfold however it unfolds. If you–as the author–step in and take any action whatsoever, it has to be sneaky and impossible for critics and readers to detect.
So, the author’s answer to the question “If you were God, what would you do next?” is “Little to nothing.”
That’s the reality of being an author. You have the power, but you can’t use it.
January 21, 2018
Splatterings
Splattering probably makes most people think of the crime writer’s ever popular “blood splattered room” or the seaside bombardments of sea gulls. However, I slightly altered the title (Smatterings) that author J. T. Ellison (I like her books) uses on Sundays for a potpourri overview of the previous week.
I don’t think this post will live up to any of that. (You’ve been warned.)
Those who follow my personal profile on Facebook know that my wife does a lot of quilting and that in the evenings I sit in the sewing room while she works and watch old movies. On Facebook, I refer to these as our quilting movies.
[image error]
Wikipedia Photo
Recently, we watched an old navy movie called “Destroyer” starring Glen Ford and Edward G. Robinson about an ex-navy man (Robinson) who works in the shipyard building a new destroyer and then rejoins the navy as a chief petty officer. He quickly finds out he’s out of touch. Since I was in the navy, I have fun watching these old ships-at-sea movies, though in this one, it was weird seeing tough-guy Robinson as a navy chief rather than a mobster. I saw a few accuracy problems with the film, including non-commissioned personnel saying “aye aye sir” to other non-commissioner personnel and the crew of the ship wearing navy dress whites once in a while at sea. Fun movie.
Our discussions on the new Literary Forum are slowly drawing in more people who like to talk about the books they’re reading or the books they’re writing. I hope you’ll stop by and join the discussion.
Finally, the three Thursday night shows my wife and I watch have returned after being [image error]on hiatus during the holidays: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” and “How to Get Away With Murder.” “Grey’s” is getting a bit worn out by now since it’s been around a while, and “Scandal” and “How To Get Away with Murder” are ending after this season. “How to Get Away With Murder” has such a tangled plot that my wife and I believe we know less about what’s going on with each new episode.
If you haven’t been watching the series up to now, forget it. You’ll never catch up.
[image error]I had fun reading and blogging about the mystery/thriller Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare this past week. I started reading the book before I went to sleep one night and continued reading it the following day–all day, as it turns out. I was supposed to be working on Lena, the third book in my Florida Folk Magic series, but was reading Pat’s book instead. My story–and I’d sticking to it–is that I reserved a break. Time well spent!
I’m drinking a glass of red wine right now because, frankly, I don’t care whether it’s 5:00 o’clock anywhere. I urge you to do the same because red wine is a medicine that makes us better persons.
I hope you’re having a great weekend.
January 20, 2018
Review: ‘Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare’
If you’re taking a dance class and its members find out you’re a writer and ask you to write a murder mystery about the class, what will you do? I happen to know author Pat Bertram has been taking a dance class or two or three and that her friends thought such a novel would be a real hoot.
[image error]That said, I’m surprised that Pat’s publisher didn’t put a disclaimer at the beginning of the novel that claimed “No dance class members were killed during the writing of this book.” But, Pat and her publisher Indigo Sea Press threw caution to the winds, so one wonders where the fiction begins and the truth ends–and vice versa.
The result is a very readable hoot.
When the students at a small town’s studio class find out that one of them is an author, they think it would be fun for her to write a novel about their classes in which one is killed and everybody else is a suspect. A superstitious person would know such games lead to real trouble; so would anyone who suspects the fates have a dark sense of humor. But they don’t stop to think about consequences. One of them even volunteers to be the victim. The rest of them talk about motives and murder methods.
But then somebody dies and the book thing is no longer a game. Suffice it to say, the cops are not amused by the book idea and think the writer is the killer. In this dandy mystery, everyone has a secret, a reason for covering it up, and a possible motive. The characters are well developed, the introspective protagonist wonders if she inadvertently set the stage for a murder by agreeing to write a murder mystery based on the dance class, and the cops tell her that in real life, most amateur sleuths and up dead or worse.
Readers who love mysteries will enjoy this book. Writers who write mysteries will consider being more careful when pretending to kill off their friends in a novel. And those who’ve been thinking of taking a dance class will see the story as a cautionary tale.
Pat (More Deaths Than One, Daughter I Am) has, with Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, written another compelling story.
January 19, 2018
Congress Imposes Word Limits on Members
Washington, D.C. January 19, 2018, Star-Gazer News Service–Angry about the looming government shutdown, Congress passed a wordy new law that imposed strict limits on the number of words Representatives and Senators are allowed to use each year.
[image error]Called the “Sit Down and Shut the Hell Up Law” by supporters, the bill restricts all members of Congress to 10,000 words per year, with 5,000-word bonuses for each co-sponsored bill that actually becomes a law instead of getting “bogged down in squabbling.”
“This is a results-oriented law,” said Senator John Doe (Whig-Florida), “because it forces people who are not popes to stop pontificating at taxpayer expense.”
According to informed sources, Congress passed the legislation in a snit over years of gridlock and now they’re stuck with it.
“Most Senators are playing a ‘mum’s the word’ game with reporters because the new law was unclear about which words count and which don’t count in the annual tallies,” said John Doe’s chief of staff Sally Doe since her words are not limited by the law.
A whitepaper released by Acme, a Washington, D. C. think tank that emerged after ten years of thoughtlessness, said that a longitudinal study of lawmakers’ words and deeds showed that most Senators and Representatives “obfuscated the issues by talking out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.”
“The general public is paying high salaries with lavish benefits packages to these clowns (AKA Senators and Representatives) to help govern the nation, not to talk about governing the nation,” said Acme CEO Bill Smith. “We will have a safer, more-effectively managed country by issuing sticks and stones to lawmakers rather than providing a forum for endless ‘pick a little, talk a little’ debate.”
Word-counts will be posted daily in the Congressional Record, including the sources of the words, that is, speeches on the floor, committee debates, quotes given to reporters, leaks of all kinds, and notes scribbled on bar napkins.
–
Story by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter
January 16, 2018
Starting your blog
“I love blogging and blogging has loved me back. I’ve been offered paid freelance writing gigs and paid speaking engagements because of my blogs and I’ve used the See Jane Write blog to grow a small women’s writing group into an award-winning business. A blog can also be a great way to build an audience for the book you want to write.
“Make 2018 the year you finally launch (or relaunch) your website and blog. Here’s a guide to get you started.”
via How to Start a Blog – See Jane Write
[image error]From time to time, people see that I’ve been blogging for many years and ask me how to start a blog. Seriously, folks, I’m not the one to ask because I break too many of the rules and/or some aspects of blogging don’t interest me.
However, Javacia Harris Bowser does know how to blog and offers one of the best overviews about getting started. She begins with domain name and theme considerations and works her way through the steps to having consistent content. (I’m inconsistent, but I see that consistency is better for most bloggers.
If you’re serious about writing a blog, See Jane Write before you do anything else.
January 13, 2018
Writers write: that’s what we do
I don’t know whether writing is an addiction, a calling, or just one job out of the many we could have chosen. The down side to writing novels is that if one doesn’t become famous or sort of famous, there’s no money in it. I often wish I’d become a freelance writer with a lot of magazine and newspaper writing opportunities.
[image error]I’d be earning a living with my words even though it wouldn’t be James Patterson, Dan Brown or Nora Roberts kind of money. Since I write contemporary fantasy and magical realism, it’s a paradox that the money I did make from writing came from writing computer documentation and help files. I can be intensely logical when I want to, so my user manuals were always well thought of.
The thing is, being intensely logical isn’t the real me. In fact, though I often rely on it, I’m not a fan of logic because I think it gives us an inaccurate picture of the world. While I was working on my novel-in-progress today, I thought of all this. I thought, “why do writers have to write” and “There must be another occupation that pays better.”
Like being a grave digger, maybe.
I thank the writing gods and the muses that I don’t want to write poetry. Good Lord, there’s a thankless task, more thankless than writing novels. I admire poetry, but really, I can’t write it and don’t ever buy books and magazines filled with it. I grieve for the poets.
But I also mourn the fact that writing novels is partly skill and craft and partly a popularity contest. If your name is James Patterson or John Grisham, you make money no matter what you do. Everyone else is ignored by reviewers and bookstores and don’t really want to tell friends they write novels because they’ll say they’ve never heard of them.
Early on, I wanted to work for the railroads. That would have been a much safer choice. I like trains, I really do. I was once a volunteer at a railway museum. Most of us there were jealous of the people who worked for Amtrak or the freight railroads. Whether they loved their jobs or not, they made a living wage. Writers don’t. But we keep writing because, in many ways, writing is not only a lot of fun, it’s a career we can’t do without.
So, maybe writing is an addiction.
But, it’s a fun addition once you realize there’s not going to be any money in it anymore than few of those who play little league baseball are going to end up playing for a major league team and being selected for the All Star Game.
If you’re an aspiring writer, I know this post doesn’t sound very encouraging. As Patti Smith acknowledged in M Train, writers are bums. So, it’s best to know that’s the reality of the biz at the outset.
–Malcolm
January 12, 2018
Book Bits: Writing tip, the other ‘Fire and Fury,’ Frankenstein, Natasha Trethewey, Rae Paris
[image error]There’s so much writing advice on the Internet that I’m often cynical about it, viewing much of it as being like those bottles of patent medicine that used to be sold from the backs of wagons years ago. But sometimes I find something worthy passing along. (See item 1.)
Writing Tip: How to Grow as a Writer, by Eva Deverell – “I firmly believe that as long as you’re willing to put in the work and play the long game, you can improve your writing – just like you can improve any other skill – and grow into a great writer. Here are some areas you might want to focus on…” Eva Deverell
[image error]News: Author Of The Other ‘Fire And Fury’ Book Says Business Is Booming, by Ari Shapiro and Kelley McEvers – “Hansen’s book is Fire And Fury: The Allied Bombing Of Germany 1942-1945. The beginning of that title “Fire and Fury” is the same as that of journalist and author Michael Wolff’s new exposé about the Trump administration, Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House.” (Suddenly, it’s selling well.) NPR
Essay: Man As God: ‘Frankenstein’ Turns 200, by Marcello Gleiser – “Perhaps Frankenstein’s 200th anniversary should be celebrated with a worldwide effort to build safeguards so that scientific research that attempts to create new life, or to modify existing life in fundamental ways, gets regulated and controlled. This includes CRISPR, a new technology capable of editing and modifying genomes. As with so many scientific developments, it has great promise and the potential for good and evil. At the most extreme, it offers the possibility of modifying the human species as a whole, a sort of final Frankenstein take over.” – NPR
[image error]
Wikipedia photo
Interview: Natasha Trethewey: Say It, Say It Again, with Rob Weinert-Kendt – “Poet Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer-winning 2007 collection Native Guard, which partly memorialized an African-American Civil War soldier protecting a Union-captured fort on Ship Island, Miss., was first turned into a stage work in 2014 at the Alliance Theatre. It returns Jan. 13-Feb. 4. Trethewey was U.S. poet laureate from 2012 to 2014.” American Theater
Quotation: “But to speak strictly as a writer, I wouldn’t be where I am if not for independent bookstores. My first book, Drown, stayed alive, and in turn kept my career alive, because independent booksellers continued to put the book in people’s hands long after everyone else had forgotten it. For 11 years, I had no other book and yet indie booksellers kept their faith in me. To them, I owe very much. I’ll definitely be in a lot of indie bookstores on this tour, as many as will have me.” – Junot Díaz in Shelf Awareness
[image error]Review: THE ALICE NETWORK: The story of a spy, by Kate Quinn, reviewed by Matthew Jackson – “Historical fiction is all about blending the original with the familiar, about those delicate new stitches woven into the tapestry. The best practitioners of this often subtle art can sew those new threads without ever breaking the pattern, until the new and the old, the real and the fictional, are one and the same. With her latest novel, Kate Quinn announces herself as one of the best artists of the genre.” Book Page
Essay: Has Ann Quin’s time come at last? by Jonathan Coe – “The experimental writer, who committed suicide aged 37, was disregarded in her lifetime. But her strange staccato style now seems quite in vogue.” The Spectator
[image error]Review: The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory, by Rae Paris, Reviewed by Bruce Jacobs – avored with both vulnerable hesitation and uncompromising resolution, poet and essayist Rae Paris’s debut, The Forgetting Tree, is the memoir of a young black woman’s search to understand her personal and racial past. In a journey of backwards migration, Paris leaves her past in the Los Angeles streets south of Compton on a road trip into her family’s roots in New Orleans. From there she crisscrosses the South to uncover the raw truth of slavery, segregation and racism at former plantations, cemeteries, Klan meeting houses, civil rights battlegrounds, lynching trees and graves of both famous and unnamed black ancestors.” Shelf Awareness
Book Bits is compiled randomly by author Malcolm R. Campbell
