From Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, by Walter J. Bornman:
It has long been popular to paint James K. Polk as a dark horse, but the record does not square with that tradition. If he was indeed one, he chose to ride boldly across a bright land and in doing so opened up the American West to half a century of unbridled expansion.
And from The Confessions, which I began to re-read yesterday. Seems an appropriate way to approach Lent…
The house of my soul is too cramped for you to enter: make it more spacious. It is falling to ruin; repair it. Much inside it offends your sight; I know it and I confess it. […]
But I, I slipped away in the days of my youth, and wandered from you, my God, far afield from your steadfastness. And I made of my own self a kingdom of want.
Take me down to Paradise Valley Where the C4’s primed and the girls are plotting revenge
And so ends my chaotic run at the Cody Hoyt/Cassie Dewell series — right in the middle, when the serial killer known as The Lizard King is finally rendered extinct like his tyrannranous namesake. Here, Cassie is still a lead investigator with the sheriff’s department, but after luring the King into a trap, she’s devastated when he springs the trap with C4 — wiping out part of the sheriff’s department in an apparent suicide, and ending her career. A month after this, Cassie is approached by a woman she knows and told that a boy she rescued a few years ago, Kyle Westergaard, has evidently disappeared on the river. He and his friend decided to float down to Mississippi. The sheriff’s department hasn’t even stirred to look into what could have happened, and armed with cash Cassie is put on the case. She’s effectively an unlicensed private investigator, but one with connections. Imagine her surprise when her investigation of the boys makes her realize that the Lizard King may be alive and well — though, he’s seemingly abandoned his former patterns of behavior, like driving a big rig and kidnapping/abusing/killing prostitutes.
My chaotic reading order was prompted by the fact that I was reading this series at the same time as someone else at my library, and the books I wanted to read were sometimes not there; however, I couldn’t have ended this read with a better set of books. Back of Beyond introduced the character of Bull Mitchell, a retired outfitter who Cody Hoyt recruited to guide him into Yellowstone to find a potential serial killer who had for some reason decided to join a week-long expedition into the park. Mitchell reutrns here, albeit deafer and less polite, and because both Cassie and Bull knew Cody, his ghost rides with them to some extent. Cassie is even riding Cody’s former mount, Gipper. The drama here is two-fold, then three: we’re watching Cassie try to figure out where the LK is going and then find a solution to bringing him down for once and for all, but within the bounds of the law; we have viewpoint chapters where LK is abusing two captive women and engaging in some weird father-mentor relationship with Kyle, and then close to the end Cassie realizes that the same goonie boys who had ignored her claim that the LK was alive and well are shadowing her so they can pounce and gain glory for themselves. This is a problem not because Cassie wants the glory, but because goonie boys are goonie boys: they shoot women, children, and dogs first and offer explanations later.
Quotations
“Twelve is too young,” Kyle said. “When you were the same age you shot two men,” Ben said.
“When his wife died he stopped coming in,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in probably a year and a half.” “Oh. Do you have any idea where I could find him?” The outdoor girl said, “This is a library. We can find anything.”
Cassie said, “Did you take your hearing aids out so you could talk nonstop and not answer my questions?” “Let me tell you about the other ways the Park Service plays God in Yellowstone…” Bull began.
Who’s up for a horror movie, western style? The story begins when an older man is found dead in his half-burned cabin, with a hole in his head and an empty bottle of liquor beside him. When Cody Hoyt arrives on scene, he immediately smells a fish. The deceased was his AA sponsor — and oddly, the man’s AA coins, proving decades’ worth of sobriety, have been taken. While the sheriff was eager to nail this an accidental death — the old man fell off the wagon, accidentally set fire to his cabin by overstuffing the furnace, end of story — the discovery of a hole in the deceased’s head leads to more investigation by Cody. Or it will, after Cody’s goes on a serious bender in grief and then climbs back out of the hole. A computer in the crime scene gives Cody a hint: either the old man or whoever killed him was researching a multiday horseback trek into Yellowstone. Cody, despite being suspended for certain actions undertaken during the bender that included shooting the coroner decides to investigate — and eneroute, he gains added motivation when he learns his son is on this particular trip. The result is a slow-burning psychological thriller as multiple people are interested in this particular trek into the park — and for very different reasons than to breath the clean air of the west and bond with a horse.
Take a distressed man with substance abuse problems, put his son in mortal danger, and then let some unknown party try to kill the man when he’s enroute to try to rescue his son and find out who killed his mentor. Add financial stress from having to pay a guide for his local knowledge and horses, mix with chronic danger from grizzly bears and wolves, and then throw in dollops of running into escaoed horses and murdered bodies as the man moves further into the park, suffering all the while from alcohol and cigarette withdrawal. Things are scarcely better when we move away from Cody’s perspective, as we focus on some teenagers who are scared as hell — scared of the park that their parents are making them visit, scared some of the strange people traveling in the group party, and scared of the pack leader who keeps making strange deviations from their published and agreed-upon itinerary. Then it gets worse, because people disappear every night — and the teenage girls’ father is distracted by his new girlfriend and must surely win the reward for Awful Father of the Year. When they tell him they think someone was spying on them when they tried to use the restroom, he laughs it off and tells them it was just a squirrel or something. Excuse me, but squirrels don’t laugh and leave size 11 boot prints in the dirt, Dad .
This was a very effective thriller, far more interesting than I expected at first: a routine murder investigation turns into a chaotic chase through a dangerous wilderness, filled with lethal critters and people with hidden motives and a willingness to commit desperate violence. Box somehow makes Cody sympathetic despite how deeply flawed a character he is, and I was surprised that the teenage sisters from the Highway quartet appeared here, too: I’d assumed they were one-offs, but they’re part of the action. Little Gracie even gets to stab someone! She wins “What did you do this summer” come fall, for sure.
Quotations:
When Cody looked out over the vista of green carpeted saddle slopes with tree-choked river valleys, massive red-veined geological upthrusts that bordered the eastern horizon until they gave up and became mountains, and the vast sprawling tableau of Yellowstone Lake miles ahead and below them, he said, “What big country.” Mitchell grunted and reached back into a saddlebag for his binoculars. “Don’t fall in love with it,” Mitchell said. “It’s guaranteed to break your heart.”
Mitchell clucked his tongue and his horse stepped out. He said, “I’m not sure I’m getting paid enough money to come out here into the wilderness with a desperate man withdrawing from alcohol AND cigarettes.” “Please shut up,” Cody said.
“I haven’t had a drink in days and I smoked my last cigarette two hours ago. All I want is an excuse to kill you five times over and piss on your remains. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, it’s you. The man who shot our coroner.” It seemed like ages ago, Cody thought. “Yes, well, there’s a good story that goes along with that but I’ll need to tell you at a better time.”
Who watches the watchers? Or in this case, who investigates private investigators? Cassie Dewell is intrigued by an odd phone call she gets: a wealthy Florida patron had hired a P.I. to investigate a man who swindled her out of money, but said P.I. mysteriously disappeared shortly after reporting that he was on the way to Anaconda, Montana, and that he expected results soon. (Montana also evidently has towns called Wisdom, Harmony, and Manhattan. Still no patch on New Mexico’s Truth or Consequences, though.) She gets this request while she’s working on another odd job: the creator of a nationwide treasure hunt, who left clues to a fortune in gold hidden somewhere in the wilderness, wants Cassie to see if she can suss out who he is. He doesn’t want people figuring out where the gold might be because they know the author; he wants them to find it the honest way, by deciphering the clues and riddles within the poem he used to kick off the treasure hunt. With this odd combination of cases, Cassie enlists some help in the form of a rough-and-ready young woman named April Pickett. Treasure State is far and away my favorite of the Dewell books so far, combing as it does a real-life treasure hunt and Montana’s fascinating history.
The main thrust of Treasure State is the missing P.I. and his search subject, “Marc Daly”. both Cassie and her missing predecessor realized that Daly was not a one-off, but rather a serial offender. He approached single, wealthy women while assuming various personalities, charmed them completely, then vanished after they wired him money for whatever project his personality had in mind — a movie deal, a new “killer app”. As the plot develops, we realized that the missing PI had gotten quite close indeed to the truth — but there is, as ever, a twist. The treasure hunt aspect is more of a B-plot, but brings in a minor character from Badlands, who here doesn’t get viewpoint chapters but is still heroic in his way. Speaking of bringing in characters: I was quite pleased to see April Pickett, though I much prefer her older sisters Sheridan and Lucy. Still, April’s abhorrent appraisal of men continues in good fashion. (She is responsible for introducing Dallas Cates, a character so hateable I still remember his name a year later: he is the Obadiah Hakeswill of the Pickettverse.) Dewell has definitely grown from her first appearance in The Highway: no longer a Dudley Doright, she’s accustomed to fibbing a bit (or “applying social engineering”, if you’d like) to get information she needs, and she’s much better at thinking outside the box in general. I think her prolonged struggle to find and nail the execrable Lizard King has definitely summoned up the blood and stiffened a few sinews within her. The action execution of the novel was wonderful in itself — I zipped through this in barely a day — but Box added a lot of appeal through his version of the real-life Fenn Treasure Hunt, and his foray into Anaconda’s history within America’s mining & labor movement. I also love how seriously place incorporates into Box’s writing; a lot of the restaurants he mentions really exists, and the competition between Butte (where the bosses lived) and Anaconda (where the workers lived and were poisoned by their work) is visceral.
Treasure State was a great read for me; I’m looking forward to ‘continuing’ in this series by reading the prequel (Back of Beyond) and the book where she finally finds and makes extinct her personal ‘terrible lizard king’.
Quotes
“My history with state troopers isn’t very good,” she said. “Just don’t shoot him.”
My substack subscriptions have an obvious cluster concerning humanity and the machine — or more specifically, how modern technology, particularly devices and the omnipresent digital world, warp or distort humanity. I was fortunate to encounter The Shallows and Neil Postman’s corpus of work fairly early in my adult reading life, and combined they gave me a reflexive tech-skeptic stance when thinking about attention, memory, and cognition. I began attending to issues they brought up — like Carr’s observation that reading on devices tends to fracture our attention, by continually linking to other sources and sending us on so many mental detours that we’re apt to somehow find ourselves watching “toddlers talking to dogs” videos on Youtube through a long chain of digressions. Over the years I have tried to fight back against the internet’s effects on attention and memory by imposing discipline on myself — restricting the number of tabs I can have open, resisting the urge to click on embedded links when I’m reading articles, etc — and engaging in habits like poetry memorization that not only strengthen my mind but root me further in culture. That said, when I saw this post at School of the Uncomformed, I was like a dog happily beating its tail against the floor.
“If we surrender to tech-mediated memories, we won’t just end up with withered memory abilities, but we’ll become thinner human beings who feel less substantial and less secure in themselves, and whose experience of being ‘real’ will become increasingly dependent on devices.”
The article first reviews the problem of out-sourcing our memory to the digital world, then looks at ways we can practice and strengthen our ability to put things to memory. Some of these I’ve already adopted, like the deliberate memorization of poetry, but they go beyond the what and present the reader with the how. I am still struggling to master “Barefoot Boy with Cheek” and am looking forward to trying some of their tips. They also suggest memorizing speeches, studying visual art — physical art, not just digital mirrors of art, journaling, and storytelling.
I am evidently reading the Cassie Dewell series in the most chaotic way possible, because I’m three books in and have only just finished #1. The Highway introduces Cassie Dewell, a sheriff’s inspector working in Montana who has been manipulated by her boss (said sheriff) into exposing her partner Cody Hoyt as a cop who is willing to get his hands dirty in a good cause. Specifically, planting evidence in a location not to convict someone, but to attract more attention to said location so that real evidence will be found. Although Cody is suspended and presumed fired once the paperwork is put in motion, his son anxiously reports that his sort of girlfriend has just disappeared in the middle of nowhere. When Cody asks Cassie for help, the two stumble into a case involving a serial-killer/abuser who operates from a freight truck — and he’s not alone. The Highway is an exciting story of flawed people trying to find justice in a world of far more flawed people and outright monsters, though some of its details are into “Yeah, no, I don’t want these images in my head” territory.
The Highway is a mix of the interesting and the abhorrent: the interesting chiefly lies in Cassie and her partner Cody’s relationship, because he’s an extremely able and gung-ho officer who unfortunately shoots cases and his career in the foot in his drive to pin the bad guy. He manages to be sympathetic even despite his abuses of the law, in large part because he’s a straightforward guy — a working class dad with a fire for justice, and a passion for protecting people that takes him into the boonies searching for lost kids even when he’s suspended (or fired) without pay. Cassie is the new kid on the block, self-doubting because she’s regarded as a diversity hire — and when she tries to be a stickler, she unwittingly becomes a tool of her and Cody’s boss, the sheriff, to establish a case for firing her own partner. Angry and ashamed of this, she and Cody both go out on a limb to protect the innocent when he gets a call from his son that there are two missing teenage girls. When Cody himself goes missing during the investigation, it’s all down to Cassie. There is also, however, the abhorrent: the big bad is a trucker who calls himself The Lizard King, and he has a habit of preying on vulnerable young women (particularly truck stop prostitutes, ‘lot lizards’), who wind up dead after he’s had his way with them. In the course of this story, the Lizard King runs across two teenage girls whose driving irritates him, and when the driver’s irresponsibility leads to their being stranded in the middle of nowhere, he takes the opportunity. We get some viewpoint chapters from them, and while it’s not outright graphic, the setting and suggestiveness are more than enough for things to feel reprehensible.
I enjoyed this story with the exception of the Lizard King’s sick ruminations on what he was going to do to his ‘prey’: Cassie and Cody were both sympathetic characters and the ending was ultimately satisfying. In keeping with my chaotic read of this series, I’m going to read the most recent one next, followed by the prequel, and then finally I’ll read #4 where the Lizard King meets his just reward.
Quotes:
Isabel said, “He’s the awful misogynist redneck you work with?” Cassie nodded, surprised by the half-smile pulling at her mouth. “He’s not a misogynist, necessarily,” she said. “He hates everyone equally.
Cassie Dewell, formerly of law enforcement, is now a private investigator. Exhausted by dealing with corrupt or obfuscating police bureaucracy, she’s put out her own shingle. Now, in service to a defense attorney with a horrible case in front of her, Cassie is in rural Montana – where she will encounter law enforcement so corrupt that what’s she’s dealt with before will seem like Dudley Doright. On a mission to confirm the prosecution’s evidence, she instead fights herself fighting for her life.
The case looks simple: one Blake Kleinsasser is accused of picking up his niece in a drunken state, taking her to a remote area of the family ranch, doing unmentionable things to her, and then leaving her there while he drove off and bed down to sleep off his stupor. Blake was an outsider in the family; he’d left the operation to practice finance on the east coast, and come back when their father was on his deathbed to meddle around with potential inheritance issues. The physical evidence and his niece’s testimony all appear to damn Blake, and Cassie has no interest in pushing things….until it becomes apparent that someone doesn’t like her sniffing around. She finds herself thrown in jail for suspicion of drunk driving with no charges filed; when her client (now her lawyer) springs her out, she discovers that her car with all its research notes has been torched. If Blake is as guilty as he looks, why is someone trying to interfere with her routine, “confirm the prosecution’s evidence” review?
CJ Box has created powerful and dysfunctional family clans before in his Joe Pickett series, and the Kleinsassers are fairly reprehensible. They have an interesting history, being connected to Hutterrite colonies in the United States, but that doesn’t really express itself in the story. What does come out is the fact that this family dominates their county, controlling the local law and enforcement thereof: everyone is terrified of them, both because of their money and because of the means they’ll use to maintain it. Planting evidence, Cassie realizes, is the top of the iceberg where these people are concerned. Box also weaves in a disturbing subplot involving a trucker stalking a school, and sneaking in to plant a gun he can use later; later, when a truck nearly kills Cassie and does kill a potential witness, the apparent stray thread is woven into the main story.
As different as this series is from Joe Pickett, I must say I’m still enjoying it – in part for the western landscape and the rural settings, and because of Box’s characteristic strong development of characters and pacing. I’ll be continuing in this series as grad school and other reading commitments allow. (Or, finishing it this month. You never know with me!)
Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is “Favorite Song Lyrics“, which is ridiculous. If you know me, you know I’m always listening to music and singing, even in the library, which has gotten me in trouble before. (‘Whistle while you work’ does not apply to librarians.)
But first, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Uhhh, Badlands. Last week. Honestly, in the last week I’ve been doing more writing than anything else: no movies, no books, just scribbling. I wrote two short stories and have been staring at a third from last year in despondence because the Muses refuse to guide me towards its completion.
WHAT are you reading now? I’m halfway through a Connelly novel, halfway through another Box novel, annnnnd Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, full cast audio edition was released yesterday, so I am enjoying it in the car. All the kids have changed voice actors, so I’m still getting used to everyone.
WHAT are you reading next? Something, I hope. I’m a week and a half into February and I’ve read one book. Though, my library did just get a copy of Black Baseball in Alabama. Its author has been researching the topic for years and also covers Montgomery Biscuits minor league ball. (Do you realize how hard it is to cheer for Biscuits?) Oh! and the Classics Club spin resulted in #2, which for me is….Paradise Lost. Looks like I’ll be spending part of Lent with John Milton.
And now, song lyrics! As with yesterday’s post about love songs, I can’t do a ‘top’ ten list, I can only go with what comes to mind. Trying to highlight just the lyrics is difficult when I inevitably hear the sound behind it…
(1) Frank Turner, “I Still Believe”.
And I still believe in the saints, In Jerry Lee and in Johnny and all the greats. And I still believe in the sound That has the power to raise a temple and tear it down. And I still believe in the need For guitars and drums and desperate poetry.
I love those last two lines.
(2) The Orphans, “For an Old Kentucky Anarchist”.
These are the stories that this mother spoke to me As I brought her garden back to grow I was rewarded with a warm meal Tales never to be heard Some call it poverty, but they’ll never know
She said, all I got’s my stories and this old gee-tar My crops have all come and gone away I got a head fulla recipes Enticing to the taste And a liking to wake up and greet the day Got a bad back from raising my children From hugging my husband so tight Hell, I never cared much for any government I got my Jesus when I feel the time is right
Singing, I’m the richest I’ll ever be I embrace the world I have all around me So sing a dying song and slap your knee Have a taste of TRUE ANARCHY!
(3) Billy Joel, “The Piano Man”.
This entire song is a story. I only experienced it for the first time last year and listened to it obsessively.
He says, “Son, can you play me a memory? I’m not really sure how it goes But it’s sad and it’s sweet, and I knew it complete When I wore a younger man’s clothes”
(4) Billy Bragg, “The Saturday Boy”.
She danced with me and I still hold that memory Soft and sweet And I stare up at her window As I walk down her street But I never made the first team I just made the first team laugh And she never came to the phone She was always in the bath In the end, it took me a dictionary To find out the meaning of unrequited
Bonus Bragg:
She said it was just a figment of speech And I said “You mean figure.” And she said “No, figment” Because she could never imagine it happening But it did
(5) “Not Here for High and Holy Things”.
Not here for high and holy things we render thanks to Thee, But for the common things of earth, the purple pageantry Of dawning and of dying days, the splendor of the sea. The royal robes of autumn moors, the golden gates of spring, The velvet of soft summer nights, the silver glistering Of all the million million stars, the silent song they sing.
This hymn has some of the most beautiful lyrics I know. I’ve yet to find a recording on YT that really does it justice, though.
(6) Morgan Wade. It’s hard to choose one song to spotlight Morgan’s writing.
Now I ain’t tryna ask you to save me Even I don’t like who I been lately I’m well aware That I might not ever find glory But like Hemingway and Hadley, it’s not the end of our story
(7) “King Without a Crown”, Matisyahu
Strip away the layers and reveal your soul Got to give yourself up and then you become whole You’re a slave to yourself and you don’t even know You want to live the fast life but your brain moves slow If you’re trying to stay high then you’re bound to stay low You want God but you can’t deflate your ego
Who had “Orthodox reggae artist” on their bingo card? Anyone? ….Bueller? I stumbled on this guy years ago when I think I was still fairly secular but the lyrics and sound design spoke to me.
(8) “Tonight We Ride”, Tom Russell
When I’m too damn old to sit a horse, I’ll steal the warden’s car Break my ass out of this prison, leave my teeth there in a jar You don’t need no teeth for kissing gals or smoking cheap cigars I’ll sleep with one eye open, ‘neath God’s celestial stars Tonight we rock, tonight we roll We’ll rob the Juarez liquor store for the Repasada gold And if we drink ourselves to death, ain’t that the cowboy way to go?
(9) “Who I’d Be”, Shrek the Musical
Or I could be a poet and write a different story One that tells of glory and wipes away the lies And to the skies I’d throw it, the stars would do the telling The moon would help with spelling and night would dot the I’s
Shrek the Music is phenom.
10) “Be Prepared!” The Lion King
So prepare for the coup of the century Be prepared for the murkiest scam Meticulous planning Tenacity spanning Decades of denial Is simply why I’ll Be king undisputed Respected, saluted And seen for the wonder I am Yes, my teeth and ambitions are bared Be prepared!
(11) “I Dreamed a Dream”. Including this one just in case. It’s hard to know where my love of this song lies — its lyrics, or Ruthie Henshall’s performance.
But there are dreams that cannot be And there are storms we cannot weather I had a dream my life would be So much different from this hell I’m living So different now from what it seemed Now life has killed The dream I dreamed.
Today’s teaser comes from When the Earth Had Two Moons:
The lunar calendar is a living thing: when you try to write it down, it resists.
Today’s TTT is a love freebie, so I’m going to go with….ten love songs! I can’t “top ten”, because frankly books and music are my cardinal loves and I would have to spend six months actually listing and mulling over songs to create an “ultimate” list. So, what I’m going to do is slightly biographical; I am going to list ten love songs that were important to me from teen days onward.
(1) Just To See You Smile
When you said time was all you really needed I walked away and let you have your space ‘Cause leavin’ didn’t hurt me near as badly As the tears I saw rollin’ down your face
And yesterday I knew just what you wanted When you came walkin’ up to me with him So I told you that I was happy for you And given the chance, I’d lie again
Just to see you smile I’d do anything that you wanted me to When all is said and done I’d never count the cost, it’s worth all that’s lost
As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to listen to “worldly” music — which meant pretty much anything contemporary. I somehow got away with country, though. This was…..pretty formative, I think.
(2) Tell Laura I Love Her, Ricky Valens
It’s possible I found this by accident, because somebody on Limewire mistook Ricky Valens for Ricky Nelson. It’s possible. In actuality, I found the song by buying a CD, good and proper. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more! “Tell Laura I Love Her” is part of a frankly disturbing trend of “teen romances ruined by automobile wrecks” in the 1960s — along with tracks like “Teen Angels”, “Leader of the Pack”, and “Dead Man’s Curve”.
(3) Wouldn’t It Be Nice
You know, it seems the more we talk about it It only makes it worse to live without it But let’s talk about it…. wouldn’t it be nice?!
As a teenager who was more in love with being in love than actually….being in love with anyone. this song meant a lot to me until I read a criticism of it that was like “You know, if you’re not happy out of love, you’re not going to be happy in love, because you can’t expect one person to just…make you happy. That’s a ridiculous amount of pressure for one person to put on someone else.”
(4) You’re So Good to Me
You’re kinda small And you’re such a doll I’m glad you’re mine You’re so good to me How come you are?
Back in the day, I loved this song just for its….sweetness. These days it’s somewhat more relevant because my ladyfriend is a head shorter than me.
(5)Dela, Johnny Clegg
This remains the first and only song that made me watch the credits of a movie because I HAD TO KNOW WHO WAS SINGING THAT.
A blind bird sings inside the cage that is my heart The image of your face comes to me when I’m alone in the dark If I could give a shape to this ache that I have for you If I could find the voice that says the words that capture you!
I think I know, I think I know I think I know why the dog howls at the the Moon
(6) The Way You Look Tonight, Frank Sinatra
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced me to Frank Sinatra, and I’m pretty sure that’s a sentence you’ll only find on this book blog. Do you doubt me?
to be honest (and sacrilegious) I prefer Darren’s version here to Frank’s.
(7)Never Be Anyone Else But You, Ricky Nelson
This is probably not surprising given my sheltered upbringing, but the first DVD I ever watched was episodes of The Ozzie and Harriet Show. As someone who was already raised primarily on 1950s/1960s pop, I loved Ricky Nelson.
There’ll never be anyone else But you for me Never ever be Just couldn’t be Anyone else but you
(8) REO Speedwagon
The less said about my emotional life in 2004, the better, but when I started playing GTA Vice City and heard these songs, I became an instant REO Speedwagon fan. (Yeah, sorry. GTA Vice City was my introduction to 1980s music in general.)
9, Operator. Jim Croce.
Operator — could you help me place this call? I can’t read the number you just gave me There’s something in my eyes You know, it happens every time I think about the love I thought would save me
Isn’t that the way they say it goes? Well, let’s forget all that And give me the number, if you can find it So I can call Just to tell `em I’m fine I’ve learned to overcome the blows, I’ve learned to take it well I only wish my words Could just convinced myself That it just wasn’t real But that’s not the way it feels.
Love isn’t always sugar and spice and all things nice. Sometimes it’s it’s “Operator”.
10. NUMBER TEN? I’m barely into the 2010s! And I’m starting to think I was remiss in ignoring songs like “Won’t Ever Be Lonely” by Andy Griggs, and “Would You Go With Me” by Josh Turner? WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!
Folk music!
(10) Annie Laurie, performed by the Corries
Like dew on the gowan lying Is the fall o’ her fairy feet And like wind in summer sighin’ Her voice is low and sweet Her voice is low and sweet She’s a’ the world tae me And for bonnie Annie Laurie I’d lay me doon and dee
Bonus: “Heard it in a Love Song“, because it inspired my title.
A few weeks back this song was driving me crazy, and I was subsequently driving my friends crazy. “Have you ever heard a song that has a refrain that’s something like ‘sweet little love songs’, or ‘crazy little love songs’? …I hate to say it, but I think chatgpt was the one to guess what ear worm I was guessing after.
I heard it in a love song Heard it in a lo-ooo-oove song Can’t be wrong
Share a detail you love about the season of summer into fall
List at least 7 random/ specific things YOU love to read about in books, big or small
Tag 7 people who would enjoy taking part/whose answers you are curious to read!
One is done, ditto two and three. Four is funny because Alabama does not have a transition from summer into fall. We don’t even have a fall, really, there’s just this season where it’s still hot, but the leaves are dying and we are subject to both tornadoes and hurricanes. That lasts until January-February when it’s cold and rainy, and then we go back into Tornado and Flower season, also known as spring. One of these days I should go to Vermont or something in September to see what all the fuss is about autumn. I’m sure it’s lovely.
1. Curmudgeons. I love stories with curmudgeons, especially when they’re forced out of their comfort zone and get involved in the human race again. This particular devotion began with A Christmas Carol, but I’ve explored it in numerous books like A Man Called Ove, Fred and Red, etc. It’s a trope that comes up – slightly – in the short stories series I’m reading, because one principal character has serious curmudgeon tendencies but has never been able to surrender to them in full.
2. Stories where places matter. I like stories where places, and particularly buildings, are strong presences in the story – almost characters themselves. Russell Kirk’s Ancestral Shadows had a lot of this, and again it’s a heavy feature in the short stories I’m playing around with
3. Getting weird insight into other professions. This has been true since I began reading John Grisham and found I really enjoyed the under-the-hood look into law and even journalism – the latter, in the case of The Last Juror. Even weird stuff like cops scribbling down notes on the back of interview cards (stuff that’s context-useful but doesn’t fall into ‘official’ evidence) and then filing them away. (Yes, I’m reading a Connelly cop novel at the moment, how could you tell?)
4. I like authors who know strange and archaic words, and who – when they use them – do so with panache. Bill Kauffman is quite good at this: “fossicking about in tramontane sinkholes” is one memorable phrase. Bill (he told me to call him Bill, and no, I’m not kidding) has a gift for wordplay. To quote my review of Ain’t My America: The History of Antiwar Conservatism:
After recounting the life of a Congressional solon named Hoar, who a contemporary thought would be celebrated in statuary for standing against imperialism, Kauffman notes “Alas, the statues are all dedicated to Hoar’s homonyms.”
5. Characters that pop. I would venture to say that character drama is the heart and soul of my fiction enjoyment, across mediums: the movies I love are character dramas (Groundhog Day, A Man Called Ove), the books I love are character dramas (Jayber Crow, The Awakening of Miss Prim), and it’s not an accident that I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 nonstop since its release 7+ years ago. And sure, its graphics and ability to hog-tie people who have poor manners is part of its charm, but I spend most of my time re-experiencing the story, the people and passions inside it. So, I like strong characters and their interplay, especially when two compelling characters are moving in different directions and creating a story purely through chasing their passions – but I’m especially fond of characters who are truly unique and even weird in their thinking, their speaking, and so on.
6. Small-town dramas of varying kind; this is kinda linked to my love of place, but two series that come to mind are Mitford and the Rabbi Small mysteries. I like the intimacy of these stories, and the ability to start seeing the characters as 3D people as they’re encountered more and more. Again, this is something I am trying to replicate.
7. I like the way some books can say different things to us as we re-visit them, either because we’re at a different stage of our life and our mind has continued to simmer and change, or because we simply didn’t spot the entries before.
Reading Freely 