Last night, shortly before going to bed, I saw the sad news that Wendell Berry had died. Brother Berry means a great deal to me, and has for the last fifteen years. I considered him our greatest living American, closely followed by Ron Paul. Below are ten quotes that came to mind as I considered dear Mr. Berry.
The best American is gone. May his spirit live on. May each of us strive to embody it.
Some of my quotes from Brother Wendell:
“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.” – JAYBER CROW
“One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, [he said] “They ought to round up every one of them [war protesters] and put them right in front of the communists, and then whoever killed who, it would all be to the good.” There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it. I thought of Athey’s reply to Hiram Hench. It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said “‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’” Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?” I said, “Jesus Christ.” And Troy said, “Oh”. It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.” – JAYBER CROW
“We sat there, thus apart and together, for a long time. After a while she stood up, brushed the leaf chaff from her clothes, and said, “Well, I guess we ought to be going.”
“She said “we”. What did she know? We never spoke of such things. This was in 1970, the year after I moved to the river. She was forty-six years old that year. I had loved her, had belonged to her, then, for a long time. When I think of her now, I am sometimes persuaded that she already knew that. Is this because any man believes, or fears, that a beloved woman not only knows more about him than he knows himself but also knows it sooner than he can hope to know it? Or did she really know?
“She said ‘we’, and I stood and followed her by another way back to the path through the cane and on to the road, where she went her way and I mine.” – JAYBER CROW
“You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out – perhaps a little at a time.’ And how long is that going to take?’ I don’t know. As long as you live, perhaps.’ That could be a long time.’ I will tell you a further mystery,’ he said. ‘It may take longer.” – JAYBER CROW
“It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. – JAYBER CROW
(can you tell why JAYBER CROW is my favorite novel?)
“What can’t he helped must be endured,” said Mat Feltner, and he was a man who knew.”
“Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. ‘Life is not very interesting,’ we seem to have decided. ‘Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast’. We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work to ‘recreate’ ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the ‘quality’ of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.” – WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” – THE SELECTED POEMS OF WENDELL BERRY
In those days nobody knew he was a boy who belonged to a story. In those days he did not know it himself. – THE FORCE OF A STORY
“The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.” – HANNAH COULTER
We can get rid of the television set. As soon as we see that the TV cord is a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household, we can unplug it. What a grand and neglected privilege it is to be shed of the glibness, the gleeful idiocy, the idiotic gravity, the unctuous or lubricious greed of those public faces and voices! And we can try to make our homes centers of attention and interest. Getting rid of the TV, we understand, is not just a practical act, but also a symbolical one: we thus turn our backs on the invitation to consume; we shut out the racket of consumption. The ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being. And we begin to recognize a truth disguised or denied by TV and all that it speaks and stands for: no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves. These possibilities exist everywhere, in the country or in the city, it makes no difference. All that is necessary is the time and the inner quietness to look for them, the sense to recognize them, and the grace to welcome them. They are now most often lived out in home gardens and kitchens, libraries, and workrooms. But they are beginning to be worked out, too, in little parks, in vacant lots, in neighborhood streets. Where we live is also a place where our interest and our effort can be. But they can’t be there by the means and modes of consumption. If we consume nothing but what we buy, we are living in ‘the economy,’ in ‘television land,’ not at home. It is productivity that rights the balance, and brings us home. Any way at all of joining and using the air and light and weather of your own place – even if it is only a window box, even if it is only an opened window – is a making and a having that you cannot get from TV or government or school. – THE WORLD ENDING FIRE, the Best of Wendell Berry. Edited by Paul Kingsnorth.
“Rest in peace’. That’s not the way these accounts are kept. We don’t rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do. I ain’t saying I don’t believe there’s a Heaven. I surely hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain’t easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I’ve got to admit I’d rather go to Port William. ” – A PLACE ON EARTH
I don’t think I can finish The Unexpected President tonight, and even if I finish it tomorrow I’d be unlikely to post a review until September….so here’s a rare Sunday post!
August was a dreadful month, weather-wise, with life-draining and nausea-inducing heat just sitting on us for week after week. Occasionally relief was teased in the form of thunderstorms, but never persistently. I didn’t want to get out and about too much, but I made the Selma stop of the “Howlelujah Tour”, in which two men tell stories about dogs and sing about love. (It helped that my church hosted the stop!) They do this to raise money for humane shelters. I had to tell them about Fred the Town Dog, of course. I also began attending meetings of the Prattville Silent Book Club; Prattville is a little drive, but my friends keep moving away, so I seek new friends where they might be found! I’ve enjoyed meeting new people; one woman was reading The Road to encourage her son’s reading, so they could discuss it together. Sweet! Our men’s group at church has continued meeting; at our most recent one we learned about the life and death of the Reverend Jonathan Daniels, who was killed while trying to help in the Civil Rights movement in Lowndes County, one of our Blackbelt neighbors. (Daniels also worshiped at St. Paul’s when he lived in Selma in 1965, and was partially responsible for leading to its integration.) Astonishingly, I watched no movies this month, and I can’t even say “Oh, I gave up movies for St. Michael’s Lent” or anything; the heat just sapped me so much that I’d fall asleep by eight most nights and then wake up early in the morning. Watching movies while waiting on dawn just seems odd.
Books
Books! The thing you’re here for. Let’s talk about those. August saw, for the first time since…July 2025, I think, a break from presidents. I was poking through Crusade in Europe, but all the chatter around The Odyssey put me in a Greek mood at the beginning of the month, and then mid-month I did a warp back to 1990s Treklit. While the Greek wind was unexpected, I was also in the mood to mix things up: this year has been somewhat monolithic, which is rewarding in its way (I know more about Nixon and Kennedy than anyone outside a presidential museum has a right to), but a little monotonous. I just realized I forgot to review Greek Ways, so that will be my project for this coming week.
Bible in a Year is roughly on track, give or take a week or so.
Science Survey is…well, if my reading year was a sports movie it’d be high time for the coach to give a rousing halftime speech.
America @ 250: I am currently reading two presidential biographies (60% done with Arthur, 25% done with Truman). That will bring me to 10 dead presidents remaining. A few of them, specifically LBJ, are going to be difficult to really grok, though.
(And yes, I’m going to continue reviving the 1960s use of grok until such time as it’s no longer associated with an AI. It’s only a futile effort if you don’t join me.)
Nonbook Commonplace Entries
“‘Fahrenheit 451’ presented a world where books are destroyed. ‘1984’, one where they are ‘memory holed’ and/or rewritten. ‘Brave New World’, a dystopia where pursuit of pleasure drowns serious thought, let alone memorializing such in print.Given the choice among bad options, late modernity has seized each on offer.” – Alcuin, Substack commenter reacting to the news that Amazon is buying rare books, scanning them, and then destroying them.
Lectures and Podcasts
Lectures 1-3 of “Athens and Sparta”, Hillsdale College. “Why Study the Classics”, “Life and Government in Sparta”, “Life and Government in Athens”.
Plato’s Republic is a funny book; you can’t read it for the first time unless you’ve already it two or three times.
Streaming
Star Trek Deep Space Nine 3×7: “Civil Defense”. Chief O’Brien and Jake accidentally trip an old Cardassian security program. Constant peril and monologuing by Gul Dukat ensue.
Star Trek TNG 2×13, “Time Squared”. The Enterprise-D stumbles across Captain Picard….from the future!
Star Trek Strange New Worlds 4×3: “The Griffin Incident”. Creeeeptastic horror episode, and definitely a mistake to watch before going to bed. Kirk, Spock, and La’an discover a Starfleet ship once thought to be destroyed, and all of them start seeing and hearing things. It’s definitely unsettling — one of the classic “everyone on the ship went crazy” plots but with haunted ship vibes — and with “Frame of Mind” vibes. It’s like they decided to take every element of Trek’s creepy episodes and combine them into a cocktail that needs to be chased with “The Trouble with Tribbles” .(Or, an episode in which the SNW crew are…muppets?) Although our early trio are sought out by the crew of the Big E, things only get worse.
T’Pring, who apparently materialized into a bodybag on an abandoned starship while Spock had his back turned: This is deeply unsettling. Spock, who is pretty sure he’s lost his mind: On that we are in agreement.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine 5×6: “Trials and Tribble-lations”. The crew of the Defiant are thrown back into time — and thrown into the ST TOS episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”. This was warm bath after a long day level comfort viewing.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds, 4×1. “Valles Marineris”. The Enterprise is thrown back in time, captured by a Princess of Mars, and La’an punches a dinosaur. One irritant: there’s no reference to VOY’s “Distant Origin” in which we learn about a sentient species of dinosaurs who originated on Earth and moved off-planet long before the planet-scorching KT impact.
Spock: I felt it was important to be here upon your return. La’an, dressed in cowboy clothing: You just wanted to see me in my outfit. Spock: Perhaps. Scotty: ………
Una: According to Enterprise, we can’t harm any native life because of the risk of doing harm to the future. Me: One, I thought Comms were down, how do you know you’re on Earth 65 million years ago? And two, YOU’RE ON EARTH 65 MILLION YEARS AGO! DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN? WHAT HARM COULD YOU POSSIBLY DO?
M’Benga: Are you going to try to take over the galaxy now? La’an: I don’t know.
Star Trek Voyager 3×23: “Distant Origin”. The logical followup. A reptilian scientist posits that his species evolved somewhere else in the cosmos, and after stumbling upon human remains and testing their DNA, he realized: whomever these humans are, they and his species the Voth are definitely related. They might come from the old country! Alas, the scientist is something of a Galileo and being hunted by his planet’s authorities who want to punish him for dissenting from doctrine.
Star Trek 2×15: “The Trouble with Tribbles”. Kirk is summoned to space station K7 under a distress signal, only to find that the emergency is….”Klingons are here for shore leave and we have WHEAT that needs guarding”. Also, there’s a slight tribble infestation.
ST Strange New Worlds 4×5: “Level Five Transporter Accident”. Scotty has a novel idea for improving the transporter, but turns everyone into puppets. I have to borrow from Captain Picard and say “Sometimes, number one, you just have to bow to the absurd.” That said, their dismissal of the Spock/La’an relationship and that portrayal of the Orions is unforgivable. Christina Chong and Ethan Peck are apparently a thing IRL (they did a song together), so that may have been part of the decision.
Borrowed from facebook. Una: You….punched it. La’an: I didn’t have time to shoot it in the mouth! (and yes that’s real dialogue from the dinosaurs episode)
Ortegas: Scotty turned us into puppets. Absurdity’s kinda baked into the premise.
ST Enterprise, 1×25: “Two Days and Two Nights”. The Enterprise crew beam down to the pleasure planet of Risa for two days of idleness and pleasure. Incredibly boring, except for when Trip and Malcolm get rolled after picking up two girls who turn out to be male muggers. Whoopsie.
ST Strange New Worlds 3×7. An unusually-framed episode, as we get not a standard show but rather events on the Enterprise as edited and filmed by a ‘journalist’ who is also Erica Ortega’s annoying little brother. The E is asked to escort a sea-creature that can also float about in space to another planet. The E is given the impression that this creature is ‘livestock’ that will help an alien race’s struggling colonies; it turns out to be armed and dangerous — but worse still, it’s a sentient being that has been chemically altered to be aggressive. Cap’n Pike is forced to stand with virtue against orders.
ST Strange New Worlds 4×4: “A Case of Chiarioscuro”. Commander Una, Dr. M’Benga, and Uhura are sent on a mission in a shuttle to give a stray Starfleet probe a love-tap so it doesn’t stray into Klingon territory (why did we need a doctor???), but then Klingons arrive and the trio have to make an emergency landing on a Klingon colony world so they’re not spotted by …the Klingons, Oh, and everything is in black and white..
Me: Oh ho ho, a D7! Una: The D7 is blocking our path — Me: 😀
La’an: Let’s make sure this isn’t a Trojan horse. Spock: ? La’an: It’s from The Odyssey. Spock: I am familiar with the Greeks.
That Greek wind is blowing all over the place this month!
ST Strange New Worlds 4×8: “Four and a Half Vulcans”. A deteriorating nuclear power plant on an alien world that is familiar with the Vulcans, but no other species in the Federation, begins to go into full-on breakdown. The Vulcans set up this system, but can’t reach it in time, so members of the Federation crew are medically altered to become Vulcans. For Vulcan-handwave-reasons, the crew also becomes hyperlogical. La’an, however, becomes..hmm:
Vulcan!La’an: I find it fascinating that there is so much unclaimed space out there. Space…for the taking. Me: More like Romulan La’an…. Vulcan!La’an: Soon the ship will be stronger. Faster. Unstoppable.
The neo-Vulcans suddenly don’t want to become humans again.
Ortegas: Pike is still the Captain. He won’t like us conspiring against him. Una: We are not conspiring. We are…..lightly plotting..
Although part of the episode’s premise was farcical, a recurring issue with SNW is that it can soar into farce and somehow produce moments of beauty. There is a scene in which Vulcan!La’an and Spock are engaged in a ‘katra space’, as he is trying to lure the real La’an out of the dark side that has overtaken her, and they somehow manage to combine fighting with the tango, all in a black slit dress. Dancing was how the Spock/La’an relationship came to be, a way for these two deeply repressed people to express themselves in a way that was still formal enough to feel safe, so the scene really works.
Star Trek Discovery 2×1: “Brother”. I am determined to finish season 2 of DSC for Captain Pike and Spock if it’s the last thing I do. This will be my….third or fourth attempt. After the events of DSC’s last season — in which Cool Captain Jason Isaacs was revealed to be from the mirror universe up to mischief — Discovery needs a new captain. Conveniently, the Enterprise has just been crippled, and her captain Christopher Pike is free to take over the Disco for a while. While en route to investigate some strange space whatsit, they learn about a crashed medical ship on a dangerous asteroid and attempt to effect a rescue.
Star Trek Discovery 2×2, “New Eden”. I fell asleep. Again. I always fall asleep during this episode. it’s a cure for insomnia. It’s something to do with the Discovery finding some planet in the Beta Quadrant populated by people who live like it’s the 19th century. Pike changes from his glorious TOS gold into blaaa Discovery kit.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine, 3×18: “Distant Voices”. Bashir is turning 30. He loses his mind. This is an unsettling episode the first time you watch it, because you only see Bashir roaming alone on an empty station, occasionally encountering panicked members of the crew; after you realize his mind is being destroyed by an alien virus and these members of the crew represent parts of his brain that are withering, it’s unsettling in a completely different way.
Bashir: This year is a little different. It will be my…thirtieth birthday. Garak: ? Bashir: In many human cultures, the 30th birthday is considered a landmark. It begins the slow march into middle age. Garak: And that’s considered…bad? Bashir: Well, no, but…it becomes harder and harder to ignore the passage of time. Garak: On Cardassia, growing older is a sign of …dignity, and power. Bashir: IN TWO DAYS I TURN THIRTY IF I CHOOSE TO BE GRUMPY ABOUT IT THAT’S MY PREROGATIVE
Jadzia: So, if you’re in a coma, and we’re not real, then what are we doing here? Odo: Perhaps we’re just here to give him someone to talk to. Kira: A coward, a paranoid, a hothead, and me?! You’d think he’d pick some better company. Bashir: I haven’t PICKED anyone, I’m in a COMA!
Garak: I’m part of you, remember? I know what you know. Or, perhaps a little more… Bashir: …always the man of mystery. Garak: You wouldn’t have me any other way. ^_^
Garak: You know, doctor, what I find most interesting about this entire incident is how your mind chose people you know to represent various parties of your personality — and how your mind cast me in the role of the villain! Bashir: I wouldn’t read too much into that, Garak — Garak: To think, after all this time, all these lunches, that you still don’t trust me — there’s hope for you yet. ^_^
Star Trek Deep Space Nine, 1×18, “Dramitas Personae”. DS9’s answer to TOS’s “The Naked Time” and TNG’s “The Naked Now”. No nudity.
Death by Lightning, “The Man from Ohio”. Michael Shannon plays James Garfield, and NICK OFFERMAN plays Chester Arthur. It’s going to be hard to properly hate the machine-creature Arthur when he’s played by Offerman. (Arthur’s first scene involves shoving Garfield’s future assassin vewy woughly to the floah.) Spencer Macpherson also brings an unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of Guiteau. I’ve been wanting to watch this for a while (Shannon is a superb dramatic actor, and I’ve loved Offerman since first meeting Ron Swanson), but reading Garfield/Arthur biographies opened the door. Anyhoo, this episode covers Garfield nominating some sherman spawn for presidency, only to so impress the RNC that he winds up getting nominated — and voted in as candidate — himself. GORGEOUS cinematography. One big demerit: I think the language is overstrong for the period.
Death by Lightning, “Party Faithful”. Knowing they need the New York machine to be somewhat on their side, the RNC hit up Chester Arthur to be the vice presidential candidate. Conkling (the master of the Machine) isn’t happy, but it’s better than letting that fat old has-been Hancock win. Although at their first meeting Arthur threw Guiteau (vewy woughly, to the floah), they bond after detectives chasing Guiteau confront him in a …uh, ladies boxing match that Arthur is present at. Arthur is ready for a fight, and he gives the detectives one, and they become friends after Arthur starts drunk-barfing. Arthur becomes increasingly interesting as he’s having to face down his former patron Conkling and sweet-talk him into supporting the Garfield ticket.
Arthur: MUSIC! FIGHTING! SAUSAGES!
Death by Lightning, “Casus Belli”. Tension soars between Conkling’s stalwarts and the president after he appoints a man of his own to be the Port Collector of New York — a post that takes in two-thirds of the Federal Government’s customs revenue — rather than one of Conkling’s minions. Guiteau’s attempts to land a federal post lead him to attempting a forgery, resulting in him being told he will never have a place in this administration. Conkling resolves to go to war against Garfield, and Guiteau….looks with starry eyes at the man he once ‘despised’. Nick Offerman continues to play Arthur in amazing fashion as a conflicted character; he’s Conkling’s man, but at the same time he and Garfield ocasionally stumble into chemistry and mutual connection. There’s also an amusing bit of whiplash between modern and historic dialogue: “I feel it is my duty to communicate that you really ought to fire me”. Notice my first historical whoopsie this episode: when Guiteau yells “DO YOU KNOW CHRIST?” in Garfield’s church, he’s sitting right behind Garfield, not in the back as happened in reality. In the show, Garfield recognizes Guiteau as that nut who kept showing up the White House; in reality, Garfield wrote in his journal that some young man screamed nonsense in church. This episode had one SUPERB shot where Guiteau is in a museum, and he stands in front of an empty exhibit marked “THIS DISPLAY BEING PREPARED”: he is mirrored in the glass, a man increasingly convinced he has a Destiny — to shoot Garfield and save the Republic.
Garfield: I can’t figure why a man like you would pivot to machine politics. Arthur: A man can only punch up and lose so many times. Better to be within than without. Garfield: And now that you ARE within? Once he’s seen the mountaintop, what does Chester A. Arthur stand for?
Death by Lightning, “Destiny of the Republic”.
Guiteau disappears, only to announce himself with an inexplicable gunshot at a train station. The viewer is as astonished as Garfield, as it happens out of nowhere. The back half of the episode is all about poor Garfield’s months of misery. The show potentially expands the role of Dr. Purvis, who appears to be completely aware of germ theory and approaches to antisepsis; he’s completely ignored by everyone else. I just read a surgeon’s treatment of Garfield which heavily emphasized the death-by-medicine angle of Garfield’s life, and it seems as if that would have come up. I’ll have to check out Destiny of the Republic to be sure, though, since that’s what Death by Lightning is inspired by. Arthur is deeply disturbed by the shooting, especially by the fact that Guiteau shouted his name in the aftermath. (“I am the Stalwart of Stalwarts! Arthur is president now!”) The last shot is very sweet.
Dr. Purvis: Are you aware of the new research coming out of Europe? Dr. Bliss, turning Garfield into a shish-ka-bob: THIS IS NOT EUROPE, SIR!
Mrs. Garfield, slapping Arthur: You read this, Arthur, and you read it ——- WELL! (straightens hair) Great emergencies can rouse, shall we say, generous and long-dormant traits in men. If there is a shred of real nobility in you, I suggest now is the time to let shine.
This would have been a GREAT series if they didn’t drop F-bombs like they were on The Sopranos. Also, Mrs. Garfield’s lines were not hers; they were from Julia Sand, a woman who wrote letters to Arthur imploring him to rise to the challenge of history — and yet she is not mentioned.
“You are free—free to be as able & as honorable as any man who ever filled the presidential chair. Your past—you know best what it has been. You have lived for worldly things. Fairly or unfairly, you have won them. You are rich, powerful—tomorrow, perhaps, you will be President. And what is it all worth? Are you peaceful—are you happy? What if a few days hence the hand of the next unsatisfied ruffian should lay you low & you should drag through months of weary suffering in the White House, knowing that all over the land not a prayer was uttered in your behalf, not a tear shed, that the great American people was glad to be rid of you—would not worldly honors seem rather empty then? Rise to the emergency. Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest aims. It may be difficult at once to inspire confidence, but persevere. In time—when you have given reason for it—the country will love & trust you. Your name is now on the annals of history, You cannot slink back into obscurity, if you would. A hundred years hence, school boys will recite your name in the list of Presidents and tell of your administration. And what shall posterity say? It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold. (As quoted in THE UNEXPECTED PRESIDENT)
Also, in a Chester Arthur biography I’m reading, the Garfield shooting aftermath is absurd. Guiteau puts his pistol in his pocket and strolls off; a policeman approaches him and says “Sir, I must arrest you” and Guiteau replies “I must go to jail”. So gosh-darned polite.
Star Trek Voyager 3×25: “Worst Case Scenario”. This is one of my favorite episodes of Voyager: it drops the viewer in media res, into a scenario that seems perfectly normal at first until we get a few minutes in and go “HOLUPAMINUTE”. In a nutshell, B’Elanna Torres discovers an immersive ‘holonovel’ in which the holodeck player portrays a crewman who is invited to join a coup conducted by Chakotay; it quickly becomes a favorite on Voyager, but then …we discover that a villain from a previous series had PREVIOUSLY found the holonovel and tampered with it to make it a lot more deadly. I liked getting to see the crew’s playful sides: they get REALLY invested on where the ‘holonovel’ goes. (And yes, there’s a reason I keep using ‘holonovel’ in ‘quotes’.) The episode really plays with a thread that Voyager really dropped on the whole: the tension between Maquis and Starfleet officers.
Cap’n Kate: With all due respect, Tuvok…..loosen up.
Star Trek Voyager: 4×23, “Living History”. Another favorite, this takes history as its subject. In the future, a planet who had a run in with Voyager have an entire museum devoted to their version of events; they find a version of the Doctor and activate him. He is dumbfounded at the skewed version of history being presented. I’ve grown to appreciate this more over the years, as I’ve witnessed reality be thrown down the memory hole in favor of ideological narratives numerous times.
DarkKate: When diplomacy fails, there’s only one recourse. Violence. It’s the Starfleet way.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds 4×6: “Off-Hour”. The Enterprise gets trapped by a wormhole during a shift-change (so much for happy hour) and all of the bridge’s explodey-things explode. Even Pike gets explodey-thing’d. This is a bit like TNG’s “Disaster” in that different parts of the crew are trapped in different parts of the ship and trying to muddle through their particular problems. However, they’re also racing against the clock: the longer they stay in the wormhole, the more they’ll accelerate — and at some point, the ship will disintegrate. There’s some body horror, but not nearly as much as “The Griffin Incident”.
Coming up in September…
This September marks the SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF STAR TREK. Kinda a big deal? I mean, there’s no current Trek series in production, and the novels have returned to aliens-of-the-week with no character continuity whatsoever, and Strange New Worlds has devolved into novelty episodes instead of serious character drama it’s CAPABLE OF, but…hope breeds eternal, right?
(sigh)
I might try to read some more Star Trek. Maybe I’ll replay Star Trek: Elite Force. (Except for the last mission, which is so dull. Kill the aliens, go down an elevator. Kill the aliens, go down an elevator. Cutscene. Go down an elevator, kill the aliens. Literally everything after the introductory ‘jump puzzle in zero gravity’ bit is boring and repetitive.) I should also really read some science, since I have TEN BOOKS LEFT IN THE SURVEY.
Also — am I crazy, or do these kids sound like they just popped out of 2002? My fellow Millennials, chime in!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, Bruce Thornton, and James Garfield, Ira Rutkow.
WHAT are you reading now? Just began The Unexpected President, a history of Chester Arthur. Still pecking at The Great Crusade, but I’m mostly reading it for Eisenhower’s voice.
WHAT are you reading next? Who knows? I’ve requested Truman by David McCullough via ILL, but none of my fish are biting. (The way the ILL system works is that I send in a request to five libraries; wait for each of them to say go/no go, and then try again if everyone refuses. In this case I think the sheer size of the 1200 page book is making librarians go “…I am not boxing that monster up.”) I also started reading Dan McClellan’s The Bible Says So, but we’ll see.There are always…options.
“Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning.”
Back in March, I announced that I was beginning a trio of unknowns — Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur. Then the 1960s took over, but I’m back at it. Who is James Garfield? A teacher, an officer, a forceful Republican — and a man who barred his own vice president from the White House. (John Adams probably wishes he’d thought of that — Jefferson, too!) Last of the log-cabin presidents, Garfield dreamt of becoming a sailor but only made it as far as the canals, where he decided the maritime life was not for him. An enthusiastic reader, he did well academically and was teaching lower grades before he’d even received a B.A. Although he prospered as a teacher — becoming a college president! –, it wasn’t something he wanted to do for the rest of his life; after serving as a staff officer in the Civil War (specifically, as General Rosecrans’ chief of staff), he became a force in the Republican party. Like Lincoln before him, Garfield combined aggressive campaigning for other Republicans with his own campaigns, and would serve as both a Representative and a state Senator.
One of the more contentious issues he was embroiled with was the ‘spoils system’, in which civil service jobs were handed out to political insiders rather than on merit. The “Stalwarts” of his party defended the practice: it was simply how the game was worked. You put in the work, you reap the rewards. Many in both parties, however, wanted civil service reform, and Garfield was among that number — if not a zealot for the cause the way his Democratic counterpart Cleveland was. The debate within the GOP was such that when Garfield was chosen to be the Republican candidate, he was saddled with a bitter rival within the party, Chester Arthur, who defended the spoils system. Garfield and Arthur got along so poorly that they’d refuse to speak to the other, and there were times when Arthur was refused access to the White House entirely! this made Arthur’s life after Garfield was shot most unenviable: he was positioned to ascend to the White House because a would-be assassin shot Garfield and cried “I am a Stalwart! Arthur is president now!”. Talk about bad optics.
Garfield is a unique entry in the American Presidents series because it was written by a surgeon who takes special interest in the details of Garfield’s fate after he was shot. While we now know that the bullet hit no vital organs, doctors at the time did not, and had no real way of knowing — Alexander Graham Bell’s prototype metal detector notwithstanding. They kept probing his wound with unwashed fingers and unwashed tools, ultimately leading to massive internal infections and months of prolonged pain and malnourishment: the man vomited constantly, losing a dramatic amount of weight. Rutkow devoted at least a quarter of the book to the subject of medicine at the time, and how badly Garfield was treated by men who should have known better, even as limited as their tools were. (Tellingly, Rutkow refers to the assassination attempt: Garfield was effectively killed by malpractice.)
This was a most interesting read, though it doesn’t give a huge idea into the man himself beyond a sense that he was devoted to his family, his party, and his friends; he was intellectually gifted, and appears to have been setting a good course for his office before he was shot, despite some earlier indiscretions while in office dealing with lobbyists and conflicts of interest.
Today’s TTT is ‘bookish places’, which will be a hard one, but let’s see what I manage. But first, the Tuesday Tease!
“A little polis living orderly in a high place is stronger than block-headed Nineveh,” the Assyrian capital destroyed in 612. A city-state of middling citizens governing themselves through common, publicly available laws and institutions would outlive the larger, mightier cities controlled by kings and nobles who ruled through private whim and self-interest and who lorded it over impoverished, disgruntled masses.” – GREEK WAYS, Bruce Thornton
(1) The Very Large Array. I visited this science station on the plains of San Agustin in New Mexico because of Contact, both the movie and the book.
(2) To be honest, all of New Mexico: I visited it because of Ed Abbey’s writings about the Southwest and Tony Hillerman’s The Great Taos Bank Robbery. The land of enchantment lives up to its name. I’ve been longing to go back for ten years now (!) but between medical crises and COVID it just hasn’t happened.
(3) Broad Street Books and its successor, Fairoaks Books.
Various events at Broad Street Books
A friend of mine opened Broad Street Books back in 2020 or 2021 because he felt a town Selma’s size needed a proper bookstore; a half-aisle in Walmart selling the latest airport fiction didn’t count. BSB quickly became a gathering place in town, both on purpose and on accident; David would host events like discussions with authors (his nephew is Lars Brownworth, who you can imagine I got a kick out of meeting), but the bookish community in Selma would also gather accidentally. Back when the library was still closed on Saturdays in the COVID and immediate post-covid era (it took us a while to reopen – like 2022, I think), I’d go by there every Saturday morning and got used to spending a few hours sitting and talking with either David or other people who came by. David had hoped that its position on our downtown thoroughfare would lead to lots of foot traffic, but most tourists were happy to walk right on by.
Paying a visit on National Independent Bookstores Day
A year or so back he made the decision to switch venues, buying a small cottage in the Fairoaks district: it allowed for more room for both books and conversation, and since then he’s hosted events there as well – including a series in which mayoral candidates talked about books that had inspired them. It’s harder to casually drop by Fairoaks, though, and parking is more challenging because it’s surrounded by narrow residential streets.
School Board Superintendent Johnny Moss III, now Mayor Moss
(4) The late, great, Eclipse Books
The Eclipse was the place in Montevallo to go when I was a student there, at least for my crowd. (I think the jocks had a sports bar some place.) It was a bookstore, bar, and cafe with a huge wraparound porch. I had no spending money whatsoever, but when someone asked you to hang out at the Eclipse, you went there. Unfortunately, the philosophy professor/astronomy club guru who owned it got tired of running the place, and it closed down These days the building is a tasty Mexican place with a more varied menu than I usually see, but as far as I know the Eclipse’s status as a bookish spot has never been filled by anyone else. There was a small coffee shop that tried for a while — and it had chess sets, board games, etc — but I think it folded.
(5) Monroeville.
Monroeville bills itself as Alabama’s literary capital because it was home to both Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Once while going to visit the historic courthouse (now a museum), I happened to arrive on the same night the Players were staging a production of the play based on To Kill a Mockingbird!
(6) Parnell Memorial Public Library
Would you look at that library? Isn’t it cute? And it has a park with a storywalk, and then there’s a baseball field. You can sit there, as I did this very April, reading a book and listening to kids play ball. It is a key member of a ridiculously picturesque scene. If I created it in a story, people would go, “Oh, how mawkish and absurd, places like that don’t exist!”. But it does, dear reader, it does. When I was a student at the University of Montevallo, I had the weekly pleasure of strolling just a few blocks here and picking up a stack of books, and then I could sit and read outside, if I wanted to. My girlfriend and I have met at this park more than a few times. The library has a larger building attached to it that also hosts a community theater group known as the Montevallo Main Street Players. It’s so gosh-darn wholesome.
(7) COAS Books – Las Cruces, New Mexico
COAS Books comes to mind because it was literally the first independent bookstore I ever went inside of thinking of it as a bookstore; the Eclipse was more like bar/cafe that also sold books. As I remember, I found an Asimov title in here. COAS was one of the few high points of visiting Las Cruces, and I don’t say that to diminish LC: it just happened that it was raining and gloomy the two days I was there, and Google maps was very misleading about the hotel I’d picked out. Instead of staying in a cool place surrounded by restaurants, I stayed in a definitely-gone-to-seed place surrounded by recently closed restaurants. My first meal in Cruces was a truck stop Taco Bell, because I’d been driving all day and needed something, and every place was closed, and — one of these days I’ll go back to Las Cruces. (Looking back on my post of it, I have to smile at the fickleness of memory: all I remember now is driving into town in the rain, getting frustrated about not being able to find any place to eat, and feeling down because the neighborhood, but judging by my post at the time I came away enjoying the experience in general.)
(8) Roswell, NM.
You can see why I bought a proper camera phone (Galaxy S7) before I returned out west. The Grand Canyon merited more than these muddy shots!
Why is this turning into a New Mexico post? The Land of Enchantment strikes again! I have to mention Roswell specifically because it was a place I became interested in via Roswell High and then the first WB Roswell show. When I first began planning a New Mexico trip, Roswell was a must: not because I believe there was an alien encounter there, but because in middle school I had alien posters and my best friend Gil and I were obsessed with Roswell High. I wasn’t in Roswell very long, and I was too tired from spending most of the day at the Living Desert zoo to go looking for Roswell High School (I’d planned to send Gil a picture of it), but what I saw that Sunday afternoon was absolutely charming.
(9) St. Augustine
When I came back from New Mexico, I was newly fascinated by the Spanish colonial heritage in America, so within a year of visiting the west, I started exploring the Spanish gulf coast — first in books, then in person. My coworker and I made the mistake of going on Memorial Day weekend, so it was packed, but good lord was that a beautiful city, and I hadn’t seen the Gulf in ages. St. Augustine particularly intrigued me because it’s the oldest European settlement in America — bar the claims of Pensacola, which maintains it is the oldest city in America, and it doesn’t count that the town was abandoned for a while and St. Augustine was founded in the interim. (I’m a big fan of P-Cola, and it’s a lot easier to get to than St. Augustine.)
(10) The Selma-Dallas County Library
Borrowed from the internets. Our building is an entire block long and half a block wide, so it’s hard to capture in one shot
Can’t very well write about bookish spaces without mentioning the library I grew up in, the library I grew up with — it added a second wing in the mid-1990s — and the library I’ve worked in for close to fifteen years now. Reading Freely began as “This Week at the Library”: that library has been the Selma library, because at first I was literally blogging about my weekly trips here. A slight plurality of the books I’ve read on this blog over the years have come from this library, and before I worked here I loved sitting in its courtyard, reading, or holing up in local history; now if I try that it’s “Hey, Stephen, could you help with ________”. I still do a HUGE amount of my reading here, but it’s mostly in the lunchroom. In addition to our own programming (books, cooking, arts and crafts, etc), we’re also ground zero for community events: our meeting spaces are almost always in use. Some photos:
You come here so often. Aren’t you afraid of radiation?” “No. It’s only here that life won’t slip by me, for I’m living it in the most exotic place on Earth.”
“This is Chernobyl, too”, someone posted on reddit, captioning a large radar-like installation. “Huh,” says I. A radar station? In the Zone? I’d never heard of such a thing. When I looked at its satellite footage, I noticed something nearby — Pripyat? No, not big enough. What was it? That was Chernobyl-2. Stealth-pun redditors for the win, I suppose.
The discussion thread which followed mentioned Stalking the Atomic City as a source for someone who’d spent time in Chernobyl-2, which was a military town servicing the radar station. It’s a hard day’s hike from what most people think of as Chernobyl, twenty miles or so. A “stalker” is a common name for people who enter and spend time in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone illicitly; they have no permission, and unlike official tourists, they’re not registered. What brings them there? To judge by Marikyan Kamysh’s account, they go there because it’s there — for the thrill of being where the law and good sense forbid them, or or being alone. There is something there that calls to their souls; Kamysh has made the trip over a thousand times, by his account.
The broader exclusion zone, off the tourist-beaten track, is a place of emptiness and nature’s severity; in one instant Kamysh wakes up to find that he spent the night in the same room as a wolf corpse that had been rotting slowly in the cold for ages. Kamysh’s excursions, which include time spent in radioactive areas he’s not aware or caring of — he carries no dosimeters — frequently seem pointless to me, as he literally breaks in several times a month to do rough sleeping in the woods or the military town of Chernobyl-2. (He avoids “wretched Prypyat”: it’s so touristy these days.) There’s a salient camaraderie between stalkers, though; while some come to be alone, they also enjoy camping out with one another and sharing snacks and vodka, the latter being explained as a drink that won’t freeze overnight. There’s an amusing hypocrisy here as he comments on the Zone slowly fading away as people continue to come and devour the abandoned buildings for salvage, even as he throws old chairs into his campfire during his multi-day stays in the Zone. (He also throws books in the fire after he’s looked them over which sets my teeth on edge even if they are math texts and communist politics.)
This was an interesting little book — a raw look into a place few go, and the writing has a strange attraction to it even when it’s vulgar. There were surprises here, too; Kamysh spends nights in an abandoned Orthodox church, when I assumed the Soviets were aggressively anti-Christian, and he has his most dangerous wildlife encounter not in the wilds but in a village where a lynx mother had turned a vacant house into her den.
Quotations
The Dead City. Dead, oh yes. Twice dead. For the second time, with the emergence of thousands of photos and the shitty lines of official tours. Bored hipsters shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras; rich girls from the capital soiled the rotten couches with their tattooed backs and mapped every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram. The sense of mystery has been lost; it has escaped, vanished in the web. The aura of mysticism was scattered like ash in all directions, flying through the Internet byways to distant foreign lands. After that, abandoned apartments can’t be scary.
Day three here, and it seems that the murk has deliberately spread its sullen skirts and pressed down on you with its cold clouds and drizzle. It wraps cotton balls of a morning fog around your throat and goads you with the whips of thirst through the bushes toward downtown. It goads you through the dew and wasteland toward the well-trodden stairs of the pier. I’ll fill up my plastic bottles there and guzzle this metal-flavored liquid without worrying about the harm it can do. It’s pouring outside. I fidget on the couch, listening to music through one ear pod, pull out my sleeping bag, and crawl as deep inside it as possible. The battery dies faster than the sun sets, hidden by the clouds and wrapped in a hundred layers of fall mist. I’m sitting like this with the balcony doors open, listening to raindrops pattering, wild boars padding around, listening to the rain, silence, distant metal banging, and the screams of illegal tourists.
The calm and peace that my soul needs are here; I hate thinking about going back. I’d better go look for some old books in the classrooms of the local schools. Otherwise, I’ll fly off the handle and stay here to write insane monologues and magic spells in forgotten languages with charcoal on the walls.
“I don’t understand you, Captain. I am offering you a chance to survive.” “There are more important things than survival,” Picard said very softly. “And no, you do not understand us. May we never so change that you do. Out.”
The memory of thirty years ago is hazy, but I can look back through it and see one moment of clarity: my best friend Gil and I walking around during lunch period (we always skipped lunch in favor of roaming the campus), while I told him about this Star Trek book I’d found. we were the founding members of a very short lived Star Trek fan club, our respective codenames being Sisko and Data (he was Data), and he was REALLY into the premise of this. What could get two seventh graders so worked up?
The classic ST TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” saw members of Captain Kirk’s crew accidentally swap places with their counterparts in the so-called Mirror Universe, a place where the Federation was rather different than the humanist paradise we know and love. Its officers were arrogant, mean, and avaricious; promotions were effected Klingon-style, and the women showed off their middriffs as well as their legs. Dark Mirror revisited the Mirror Universe long before Deep Space Nine did, and presented a darker and far more serious version of it. DS9 and ENT’s version of the Mirror Universe seemed loosely predicated on alternate history with random funhouse elements; the opening credits of the ENT episode in particular appeared to imply that the Terran Empire rose because the Nazis won World War 2. Dark Mirror, however, sees a mirror universe where reality and character are fundamentally altered: foul is fair. Human nature is mirrored, flipped; the noblest of characters in our universe is the most sinister and depraved: Picard is so shaken by his review of their literature (Achilles executes Priam in their Illiad) that he refuses to continue their version of Shakespeare or even open their Bible. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Enterprise is operating at the far reaches of space, there to facilitate a Cetacean scientist researching ‘hyperstrings’; they receive a message from another ship in the sector that is incomprehensible but strongly suggests bad things are in the offing, and then — a sudden dimming of reality, and a deep sense of unease among the crew. Nothing appears to have changed, but the Enterprise is no longer in its own universe. It has been sucked into the Mirror Universe by the triumphant Terran Empire, which has run out of worlds to conquer and is interested in seeing how it can project power into the ‘other’ universe — hours — and take it, as well. (Mind you, it hasn’t conquered the entire Milky Way, just the local ‘arm’ we’re in: given the scales involved, though, it’s evidently easier to invade another universe than travel to another arm of the galaxy.) This leads to some “Mirror, Mirror” style stealth and deceit, and is something of a psychological thriller as Picard and others realize how disturbing their counterparts are and work to foil their plans without being exposed and then tortured. There’s a strong undercurrent of sexual malice here, something the DS9 mirror universe stories played with in the person of The Intendant.
This was just as good as I remember, even more so because I’ve actually seen “Mirror, Mirror” and particularly enjoyed Duane’s writing — especially the time we spent in Picard’s head. Because I wasn’t able to watch a lot of TOS as a kid, this was my introduction to the Mirror Universe, and I found the premise completely thrilling. Duane’s worldbuilding, developing these Terrans’ history and culture, made the story even more effective. Duane actually tries to recreate what their alter-Shakespeare might have read like, but I was so unfamiliar with the plays discussed (“The Merchant of Venice” was one I recognized purely for the Shylock character) that I didn’t fully get the darkness there. Although this Mirror Universe is definitely un-canon, it’s more psychologically if not historically interesting than the one DS9 developed, and I say that as someone who loves DS9.
Quotations
“Captain,” Hwiii said in what sounded like complete satisfaction, “I am going to be as happy as a clam in mud.” “How does one go about quantifying the emotional state of mollusks, Commander?” Data asked innocently as Picard headed back for the turbolift.
“What kind of people are we there?” she said. Picard looked briefly off into the distance. “Another Enterprise…, he said softly. “Another Troi…” “Another Picard,” Deanna said. “Cold, he saw you. A grim, quiet terror, hard, like iron. And another Riker—cruel, and liking the cruelty.” She breathed out, feeling Stewart’s fear still clawing at her back. “And you?” Picard said. “Death,” Deanna said, “in an odd uniform. And worse than either of you.”
I cannot tell you how many times I read through this book in high school, but it’s the foundation of everything I know about Star Trek’s original production, from the practical effects to the behind the scenes drama. I Am Spock is not entirely about Star Trek – it’s more of a memoir of Nimoy’s life current to 1995 – but Trek, or “Spock”, completely dominates it. As part of this week’s retro-reading, I wanted to revisit it for the first time in many years.
Part of understanding I Am Spock is that Nimoy had written a previous memoir called I Am Not Spock, which covered his early career and gave fans the impression that Nimoy was trying to distance himself from his pointy-eared hobgoblin alter ego. This led to speculation later on, after the details of The Wrath of Khan were revealed, that Nimoy had consented to do the movie only on the promise that Spock be killed off so that Nimoy could move on in his career. That’s not just fan speculation, either: producers thought Nimoy was distancing himself from Spock as early as The Motion Picture, when their original script barely included the character at all. That is not the case, Nimoy argues here: a thesis of the memoir is that while Nimoy views himself as more than Spock, he nonetheless accepts that Spock has become a deeply ingrained part of his being. Living in a character’s skin for so long – fighting for that character’s integrity, in fact, doing more of the character’s development than the writers did – had permanently altered Nimoy’s own being.
Nimoy realized he wanted to be an actor fairly early in life, being a shy and awkward boy who found relief from social awkwardness in disappearing behind a role and making it his own. He began as a disfigured young boxer in Kid Monk Baroni, then began appearing on The Lieutenant and making a useful contact: Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry was then working on a pilot for a new show, and wondered if Nimoy might be interested. I never fail to delight in learning about the production aspects of shows like Star Trek that I love, and I Am Spock is full of interesting ones – from Roddenberry thinking that Spock should sound as if he learned English from cassette tapes (hence the slightly English intonation Spock sometimes had early on) to screen tests with “alien” skins (a red Spock looked horrible on black and white sets) and Nimoy’s increasing arguments with writers as he began grokking the character. (Fun fact: Spock quickly became so loved that bumper stickers saying “I GROK SPOCK” became a thing.)
The memoir covers the entirety of TOS’s original run, including Nimoy’s bewilderment that the show, and his character, could become so popular; at first he hadn’t even removed his number from the public telephone listings. Nimoy did not fall to pieces when the original five-year-mission ended two seasons too early; instead, he moved on to other work. Acting was a job, after all, not a religion, and he was eager to try more challenging roles and even begin working as a director. But love for Star Trek ballooned in the 1970s as the show hit syndication, and the arrival of Star Wars created pressure for a Trek revival – a movie of its own, and maybe another show. Star Trek: Phase II was interesting to learn about as a kid, especially after seeing how details of it were incorporated into The Motion Picture and later Trek works. Nimoy truly thought Trek had shot its bolt after The Motion Picture– who could want more of that highbrow bloat, the promiscuous tracking shots? Where was the movement, the fun? Still, though, the explosion of fan conventions and the persistent interest in more Trek gradually made Nimoy aware that Spock was going to be inescapable for him. Star Trek was penetrating the culture, with magazine ads saying stuff like ‘to boldly go’, and billboard ads boasting his image – and his ears! – in a very suggestive Heineken ad. Star Trek was far from done, though: while Nimoy continued working on other projects – film, theater, photography, poetry – Paramount Pictures had made Star Trek its own and wanted to bring Trek back to the big screen. That would lead to Nimoy getting his chance at high-level direction when The Search for Spock became his baby to develop and direct.
Although I’ve read this book so many times over the years that parts of it have been committed to memory, I really enjoyed settling in again. The story is one I enjoy revisiting, in part because Nimoy was such a serious performer and then director – but his ongoing dialogue with Spock adds enormously to the memoir. It’s punctuated with literal discussions between Nimoy and his alter-ego on what he and Star Trek are going through, and these conversations can range from simply funny to downright poignant. Nimoy’s interactions with other people, too, are rewarding to read about – from his impassioned debates with writers over how Spock would react to this or that, to his brotherly rivalry with Bill Shatner which would result in constant pranking and fooling around on set. This would continue even when Nimoy was directing Shatner, as they’d get into mock-arguments on set, pounding desks and shouting while the camera crew rolled their eyes and waited for the tomfoolery to desist. Nimoy and Isaac Asimov’s exchanges by letter are also amusing; I hadn’t met the dear doctor when I first read this, but now having consumed scores of Asimov titles, it was fun to see him discussing Spock’s attraction to women with Nimoy. All the while, Nimoy’s genuine love for Spock as a character, as an ideal and as a person come through.
One thing this memoir made me think about: Star Trek has survived at least two deaths to date, its execution in early 1969 and its collapse from overmilking in the mid-2000s. Despite Trek’s status in summer 2026 – with no shows in production, only rumors of a movie, and a fanbase divided and exhausted – I don’t think it’s dead yet.
Highly recommended.
Spock: Live long and prosper. Nimoy: I think I’ve already done the former, Spock. And — in no small part thanks to you — I’ve certainly done the latter.
Related: I Am Spock, Leonard Nimoy. I didn’t realize, but I re-read and reviewed this on the blog back in 2010. It’s interesting to see how 2010 me and 2026 me notice similar things but have different priorities. (2010 me has a lot less personality as a writer, too, I think.)
Captain Jean-Luc Picard just showed up at a sector captains’ meeting with a serious case of imposter syndrome. He’s all of 28, and the only reason he’s a captain is that everyone higher else up on the command chain got killed and he made good acting-captain decisions when he was suddenly thrust into the chair. No one takes him seriously at the meeting, except for Admiral McActeer, who has inexplicably and publicly declared that Captain Picard is now tasked with taking down the White Wolf, some pirate who’s been plaguing the sector. It’s nice to have higher command believing in him, he supposes, but this feels a bit much for a first jo – wait. Admiral McActeer just assigned him seven new crewmembers without Picard’s input, and they’re all Breakfast Club level problematic? Welcome to Gauntlet, the first in the Star Trek: Stargazer series!
Michael Jan Friedman is one of the earliest Treklit authors I got attached to, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this series wasn’t responsible for that. In another book, Valiant, MJF depicted the circumstances that saw a young Picard take emergency command of the good ship Valiant, leading to his promotion to Captain and his receiving the Stargazer. Gauntlet begins very soon after Picard receives his first command, and the outlook is not good. His first mission is seemingly impossible: to take down a pirate who three outstanding captains have failed to capture, in large part because the White Wolf holes up in a Badlands-type system where space is not vast and mostly empty, but a minefield of energy distortions that cripple sensors and can destroy ships. However – The White Wolf lives there. There must be a way to navigate. But can a young captain and an untested crew – worse, a crew partially hobbled by new problem children the Admiral wants to get rid of – find the way?
There’s a lot going on in this little novel, as we see Picard struggling against his own self doubt but relying on a mostly-memorable ensemble cast to improvise solutions through the not-Badlands’ wild array of hostile space phenomena. This is truly an ensemble story, because while Picard does take the center stage, he does not dominate the novel; instead we follow a security officer with disciplinary problems but a heart of gold, another officer who is perfect paragon of Starfleet virtue who…is also a bully toward crewmen who look like dressed turkeys, and a second officer who is so punctilious I can’t help but cast her with Kim Cattrall’s Valeris. There’s an interesting mix of “bad officers who are good, good officers who are bad, and bad officers who, yep, were really bad” present here, and not everyone is dealt with in this first novel as I remember. This series had one of those scenes that I SWORE I REMEMBER BEING IN THE SHOW but apparently only happened in my head: Picard orders a retreat, and then a sudden stop that coincides with a full broadside of phaser and torpedo fire. When his crew asks, politely, ‘The hell was that, sir?” he says he got the idea from a fencing maneuver called a stop-thrust, which often begins with a feigned retreat.
Good stuff all around. I suspect I’ll be reading Progenitor, too, because it’s got a bit of poetry or song in it that I’ve remembered for 25+ years and have always been frustrated by because I’ve hoped to find the full thing and am hoping it’s not something MJF just made up one single verse for.
Related: Stargazer: Three, Michael Jan Friedman. Somehow I skipped this novel when I was reading the original run of the series, and in 2010 when I began trying to catch up on the Treklit universe buying used paperbacks, this is one I went after.
Reading Freely 
