Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 43

Frequently asked questions

All the class websites have a FAQ section. I seldom look at these because I don’t have any questions and/or suspect the page will be a marketing ploy. So this post is for the bold, those willing to go where no one has gone before.

Since you write magical realism, do you really believe in magic?Yes. In fact, I think that magic is often more true than realism.Did you always want to be a writer?Goodness no. I wanted to be a locomotive engineer, a national parks ranger, or a Jungian psychologist. However, I was tricked by the dark side into taking radio-TV writing and production, and journalism courses during the days when a liberal arts education could supposedly get you a job anywhere. It couldn’t.Is it true that you went into the gigolo business?On the advice of my attorney, I cannot answer that question other than to say “what do you think?”If you had a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, what would you choose?The sea, always. I grew up on the Florida coast, so water is nearly sacred to me. I’ve crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by ship and am happy to say neither voyage was made on a so-called cruise ship, a ship that seems more like a floating Disney World than a way of experiencing the sea.I read somewhere that you were brought up by alligators in the Everglades.That was wishful thinking that might not have been true.You were born in California, right?In Berkeley, the center of rebellion against the establishment. However, my Facebook page says I’m from Florida partly because I am and partly because I think California has become everything we fought against at Berkeley. I left my heart in San Francisco, but I’m not going back for it.Who are your favorite authors?James Joyce, Michael Shaara, and Pat Conroy. Yes, I know they don’t exactly have a lot in common. Well, other than me.Where do you stand politically?My attorney, John Beresford Tipton, doesn’t want me to answer that question because such answers often lead to name-calling and threats rather than dialogue. I will say this: we have way too much government.How in the hell do you work on such a cluttered desk?Creativity comes from chaos. Actually, I think it’s important to create chaos rather than order.Are you really a Scot?According to my genealogy, very much so. But no, I wasn’t born there, not in this lifetime. I do favor all things Scottish over anything English. Queen Elizabeth I kidnapped and murdered our queen, Mary Queen of Scots, so I have little positive to say about England and its monarchy.  Plus, the English can’t cook.Are you a dog person or a cat person?A cat person. It’s my wife’s fault. We’ve probably “adopted” a hundred cats since we got married. Okay, maybe ten cats.Are you happen being a writer?Yes and no. Unless you’re James Patterson, it’s more of a hobby than a profession.

–Malcolm

Re-reading Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’

This is the first time I’ve re-read this book since it came out in 2013. My feelings now are about the same as they were nine years ago. The storyline is another chase scene in which the bad guys are after Robert Langdon and a young doctor who befriends him through Florence.  Florence is one of my favorite cities, so it was fun reading about places I visited. If you’re about ready to travel to Florence, read this book first.

Otherwise, the story drags. Langdon wakes up in a hospital in Florence with a head wound (a bullet grazed his scalp) and has no idea why he’s in Italy. Always a handy plot crutch, retrograde amnesia keeps the main character in he dark about his circumstances while an assassin tries again to kill him–with the help of the U.S. Consulate–along with all the police in the country.

The book is a travelogue with two desperate people running through it. The catcher in the rye is the pariah of a scientist Bertrand Zobrist who advocates letting plagues run wild because that is–according to his research–the only way the Earth’s unsustainable population levels can be brought under control. I must admit that as global warming issues have become more pronounced, his view of the population’s fate is more chilling now than when I first read the book. (I enjoyed Dante’s Divine Comedy more than this book.)

Like all of Brown’s books, the story is heavy on exposition about history and art, in this case, Florence and Dante. If you took all that out of the book, it would be a novella. I re-read this book due to the lack of anything new in the house and really wish I’d picked something else to re-read like one of John Hart’s or Pat Conroy’s books.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism, satire, and contemp[orary fantasy novels including The Sun Singer.

‘We need to re-do the kitchen: it’s soooo dated’

Not that we’re addicted, but we watch several of the house hunter shows on HGTV. They’re not quite what they seem. If the rules are the same as when I last looked, those hunting for a house have to actually buy a house before they visit three potential properties on the show. One of them, they already own.

My historic preservation background makes me a bit of a purist in that I think older houses should generally not be redone so that the inside looks like an open-concept 2022 house.  Well, nobody asked me, so it is as it is.

It’s hard for me to imagine looking at houses and making a list of move-in projects. Quite often, the prospective owners want to overhaul the kitchen with new paint, new appliances, removing the wall between the kitchen and dining room, new countertops, and a larger, more-spectacular island. Sometimes they ask the real estate agent how much a new kitchen would cost, and hear that it’s a mere $10,000 to $20,000.

Hell, the people are already spending a million bucks on the place, so what’s another twenty grand? It all seems so materialistic and excessive. I don’t get it. If I buy a new house with cream-colored kitchen cabinets, I’m not going into a snit to repaint them white just after we close on the house. I didn’t grow up with this kind of money and, with parents who lived through the depression and ran the household on a teacher’s salary, I’ve ended up with more of a make-do attitude than the spoilt brats buying the houses.

And here ends today’s rant.

—Malcolm

‘West with the Night,’ by Beryl Markham

“No one has written more lusciously about that pilgrimage [our temporal voyages into the unknown], nor undertaken it with more elemental daring, than Beryl Markham (October 16, 1902–August 3, 1986). Known to the world as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West with the sweep of night, against headwinds and storms particularly ferocious in that direction, she is Amelia Earhart without the pomp, Thoreau with muscle and humor, a luckier Shackleton of the sky.” – “A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night” in The Marginalian

The 1942 book was well-received but went out of print until it was “re-discovered” and re-issued in 1983 when Markham was long forgotten and living in poverty. Even now, most people have never heard of her: the publisher’s description for the 2010 edition says “though most now dispute this claim.” That is not only incorrect but unconscionable. Since that ticks me off, I’m not showing the current cover of the book displayed on Amazon. She lacked the kind of PR team other pilots had. Or, maybe it’s because she was a fierce and promiscuous woman.

When the book first came out, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his editor, “she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers … it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

One of my favorite Markham quotes, which was cited in The Marginalian, is “I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch… I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. These I learned at once. But most things came harder.”

I read the book many years ago and felt the same way Hemingway did. And  I continue to think what a shame it is that her name and accomplishments remain scarcely known.

–Malcolm

Briefly Noted: ‘Mother Finds a Body,’ by Gypsy Rose Lee

Original

This novel, published in 1942, was considered a sequel to Lee’s 1941 novel The G-String Murders which had been made into a “cleaned-up” film starring Barbara Stanwyck called “Lady of Burlesque.” A read The G-String Murders when I was in junior high school and thought it was a hoot.  It suddenly appeared on the family’s bookshelves and then disappeared after I read it and put it back. I never asked questions about why books came and went because that would have diluted our cases of plausible deniability.

From the Publisher

“This encore performance by the author of The G-String Murders is simply “one of the greatest mysteries ever written” (Philadelphia Daily News).

Current

“It’s supposed to be a quiet honeymoon getaway for celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and Biff Brannigan, ex-comic and ex-Casanova of the Burly Q circuit, settled as they are in a cozy trailer built for two. If you don’t count Gypsy’s overbearing mother, a monkey act, and Gee Gee, a.k.a. the Platinum Panic. Not to mention the best man found shot to death in the bathtub. Strippers are used to ballyhoo, but this time it’s murder.

“Leave it to Gypsy and her latest scandal to draw a crowd: Biff’s burnt-out ex-flame, a sleazy dive owner with a Ziegfeld complex, a bus-and-truck circus troupe, and a local Texas sheriff randy for celebrities. But when another corpse turns up with a knife in his back, Gypsy fears that some rube is dead set on pulling the curtain on her bump and grind. She’s been in the biz long enough to know this ghastly mess is just a tease of things to come.”

Questions were asked whether Lee really wrote the novels or used the ghost writer Craig Rice (aka Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig called the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction”) Rice said she did not write either of Lee’s novels.

Mother Finds a Body gets off to a quick start:

“A temperature of one hundred and ten at night isn’t exactly the climate for murder, and mother was suffering from a chronic case of both. She pushed the damp, tight curls off her forehead and tapped her foot impatiently on the trailer doorstep.

“‘You either bury that body in the woods tonight, or you finish your honeymoon without your mother.'”

Don’t ask why mother came along on a honeymoon because that seems more sordid than a dead guy in the bathtub.

—Malcolm

Grocery Store Books – gone with the pandemic?

I used to buy a fair number of mystery thrillers and police procedurals at the Publix grocery store, just down the aisle from the cookies and crackers. With no offense to the authors, I called these books–from Greg Iles, James Patterson, Stuart Woods, and others–“grocery store books” because that’s where I’d see the covers and blurbs and get tempted into buying them.

Now they’re gone.

Could be another supply chain problem or a decision by somebody at Publix that another product would work better in that shelf space. Too bad, because this shelf was the source of a lot of good–usually quick–reading. Recently, while looking for something else, I found 24 Hours, a two-year-old novel by Greg Iles on Amazon. Wow, maybe I don’t have to buy buy grocery store books at Publix or Kroger.

Typical of Iles, 24 Hours didn’t take long to read, maily because the plot–about kidnappers–is constructed in a way that keeps you from putting the book down. They have a fool-proof system, one that they’ve run five times before without a glitch; and without getting caught.

However, this time out, Will and Karen Jennings fight back in part because their kidnapped daughter Abby has diabetes and can’t sit for 24 hours in a cabin without her shots. This introduces a major complication in the kidnappers’ schedule while leading the Jennings to take bigger risks than most victims.

Is the book true to life? Probably not. But once you start reading it, I don’t think you’ll care. You’ll roar through the pages like a crazed grizzley because you’ve come to despise the kidnappers and want to see them kicked into next week without harming Abby. The book reads well with a family-size back of Oreo cookies or steamed broccoli.

–Malcolm

I think this comedy/satire would make a great grocery store book. Publix? Kroger?

I got potpourri, so it must be Sunday

If you like the artist Edward Hopper as much as I do, you might enjoy this article in The Guardian about an upcoming documentary film, “Artist of ‘loneliness’ Edward Hopper depended on his wife, says film-maker.” “Hopper: An American Love Story” will be in theaters on October 18th. According to the article, “Hopper himself relished solitude, preferring a hermit-like existence – albeit with his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, also an artist – to social gatherings. The volatile relationship between the laconic Ed and the spirited but resentful Jo is at the heart of a new documentary film made by the British director Phil Grabsky, opening in cinemas this month.” If you subscribe to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you’ll find the concept running front and center through Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library which I’ve been re-reading this week. Imagine that, instead of dying, you end up in a library with an infinite number of books about your probable lives. These books will lead you to samples of other lives you could be living, mainly when you give up the regrets you’ve accumulated in your current life. Interesting premise for a novel. I think there’s a bit of a flaw in the library’s system, but pointing it out here might be a bit of a spoiler. Read. and hope for the best.My wife is now in that limbo period between her cataract surgery (on Wednesday) and the time when the eye has healed up enough for her to get a new prescription. Right now, she has a plain glass lens in her glasses since her previous prescription wouldn’t work with her “new eye.” She says her vision is much better out of that eye even though seeing things clearly has a bit of weirdness to it. I know what she means since I went through all this several years ago.As a pacifist, I really shouldn’t say this, but I think the world would be a whole lot safer if Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin met with an unfortunate “accident.” Maybe Abby and Martha, the aunts in “Arsenic and Old Lace” can invite him over for spiked “elderberry wine.”

–Malcolm

That fried egg for breakfast

Before falling asleep at night, I have grand plans to cook a fried egg for breakfast. After all, that’s what I got used to as a child, eggs and bacon in a cast-iron frying pan with the grease saved in a small metal container on the stovetop for later.

Looks good, but over easy would look better – Wikipedia photo

But then when morning comes, I’m too sleepy to cook an egg–over easy with a few red pepper flakes scattered over it–much less having to wash the frying pan afterward. So, I toss two Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits in the microwave for 58 seconds and there’s breakfast.

A lot of things are like that fried egg for breakfast. The idea sounds good, but then when it comes time to do it, it’s simply too much trouble. When it comes down to it, most chores are too much trouble as are the more important things in life.

After a trip to Scotland, my brother said that nobody there knows how to cook a fried egg over easy or over medium. If you ask for it, they don’t know what you’re talking about–and still “don’t get it” after you explain how to do it. “Lads, it’s like anything else you fry on both sides!”

This probably explains why Scotland has been under the English thumb for so long. When a chance came to vote for independence, the idea sounded good but nobody quite knew how to flip a government.

But, I digress.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the comedy/satire Special Investigative Reporter.

New Title: ‘An Empty House by the River’ by Robert Hays

New from Florida Publisher Thomas-Jacob on October 4–in spite of Hurricane Ian–a new novel by colleague Robert Hays (“An Inchworm Takes Wing,” “Blood on the Roses”).

From the Publisher

Life has been good in the old Prather house on the bluff overlooking Singleton’s Branch. Then the second “once in a hundred years” flood in a decade brings changes that will affect the Prather family for years to come. Lacy, who sees beauty wherever she looks and expects others to be as good as she is, can no longer count on her big brother to protect her from an abusive husband, and the family learns a hard truth: No one is immune to the quirks of fate, be they blessings or tragedies, and the river takes more than it gives.

The book is currently available in paperback and e-book.

–Malcolm

New Title: ‘I’m Tired of Racism: True Stories of Existing While Black’ by Sharon Hurley Hall

Writer and educator, Sharon Hurley Hall (Exploring Shadeism), released this book of essays on October 1, bringing the information and wisdom of her Anti-Racism Newsletter to a wider audience.

From the Publisher

To feel empathy, you need to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If the experiences of racism in a white supremacist system seem too far away from your daily reality, I’m Tired of Racism will change that. If you think of racism as something that only happens where you are, I’m Tired of Racism will change that, too. And if you’re wondering how you can be a true ally and avoid performative nonsense, this book is an excellent starting point.

“I’m Tired of Racism” collects many of Sharon Hurley Hall’s anti-racism essays, sharing her global perspective on racism, anti-racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, born out of experiences in the Caribbean, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. Hurley Hall has lived and worked in multiple countries, enabling her to accurately reflect what’s the same and what’s different about experiences of racism in different locations.

The foreword, by Ashanti Maya Martin, says: “Because Sharon’s experience is rooted in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Europe, she’s able to tell us how the U.S. looks from the outside in (not great at the moment), and explain how even being a citizen of a Black-majority country comes with its own layered burdens rooted in colonialism and white supremacy.”

The book is available on Kindle and in hardcover. The audiobook and paperback editions will be available soon. I have known Sharon online for possibly 20 years and look forward to seeing her newsletter in my in-basket.

Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the Florida Folk Magic Series about a conjure woman fighting the KKK in a 1950s-era town in the Florida Panhandle. The series begins with “Conjure Woman’s Cat.”