Top Teddy Tuesday

Posted on October 22, 2024 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is how our reading habits have changed over time. First up, though, the ol’ Teddy Tease.

Loeb made a small sound, and Roosevelt waited for more, saw his son Archie running past in pursuit. With a hint of alarm, Loeb said, “Which one was that, sir?”
“That was Archie, my second youngest.”
“No, sir, the animal.”
“Oh. That was Josiah, the badger. I call him Josh.” (The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt, Jeff Shaara)

The thing is, enchantment that doesn’t compel you to change your life is not enchantment at all. It’s going to be hard to make this journey back to a richer and more vital understanding of our spiritual lives, but what else can we do? As Virgil says to Dante when they first met in the forest clearing, if you stay here, you’re going to die. (Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher)

So! Ways my reading has changed through the years…

(1) Rereads. Before entering the workforce, I didn’t have the means to buy books very often, so I would constantly re-read the titles I had. My copies of The Rainmaker and The Last Juror, as well as many Star Trek paperbacks and S.E. Hinton paperbacks, are absolutely battered. These days it’s rare that I re-read a book, with some exceptions: Asimov’s Black Widower mysteries are always enjoying little diversions, and occasionally I re-read a book to give it a proper review or to see how my perspective has changed over a course of years.

(2) Reading anything. As a kid, I’d come home from the library with books on anything and everything, but in high school I’d drifted to reading far more narrowly — just history, Star Trek, and thrillers. In 2005/2006 I began questioning my worldview rather drastically and began reading much more nonfiction and from a broader range. It began with my rediscovering the joys of science, but then I began reading philosophy, economics, urban planning, etc.

(3) A shift to e-reading. After I finally bought a smartphone (in 2018 — very much the black mirror skeptic) and could begin reading Kindle titles on my phone, ebooks have grown to account for at least half of my reading in any given year. I still read and love physical books, but the space saving and convenience have counted for a lot, not to mention my library’s ebook collection grows steadily with every year.

(4) The force is not with this one. I used to read Star Wars novels on a regular basis, but after the rat-empire seized Star Was as a property and declared the entirety of the Extended Universe vanquished, in favor of its far inferior cinematic storytelling, I’ve lost interest in the franchise as a whole.

(5) Fiction has had a huge upsurge this year, seizing a lead early and never relinquishing it. I’m still rooting for NF. (“Aren’t you ….in charge of that?”, a reader may ask, the answer is — no, not really. I follow the Muses, or their bookish equivalents.)

(6) Religious reading has changed enormously since I first began writing this blog in 2007 — back then I’d just left Pentecostalism and was mostly reading anti-religious works, but within a couple of years, I’d become inexplicably interested in religion, philosophy, and meaning: religion & philosophy reading hit a high water mark in 2009, and was all over the place. I’d read stuff I knew I wouldn’t like just to be exposed to it, like The Four Agreements and Deepak Chopra. Over the years (beginning with 2011) my religious reading has become more tightly focused to Christianity, and specifically to Catholic & Orthodox theology & practice.

(7) and (8). Science fiction and historical fiction have both grown over the years. Early on, the only Hf I read was Jeff Shaara novels, but then I stumbled onto Steven Saylor and Bernard Cornwell and they led me to others, like Kane and Harris, and soon I was even reading historical fiction that didn’t involve stabbing and shooting. Science fiction, likewise, began as “Star Trek and Isaac Asimov”, but now I’m fairly active reading it and have several favorite contemporary authors: Daniel Suarez comes to mind.

(9) Audiobooks are now a thing. For most of this blog’s history, I almost never read an audiobook except for the occasional one on CD. That changed when I learned that Wil Wheaton was an audible reader, which proved to be my gateway drug into Audible in general.

(10) This is less about reading and more about reviewing, but if you go back to 2007/2008 you’ll find my reviews are painfully formal, whereas now I’m perfectly happy to post something like Kinfolk, half of which was written in a southern vernacular inspired by both Sean Dietrich’s folksiness. I think my reviews have gotten progressively more ‘personable’ over the years. I don’t go back to my early reviews unless I want to find out about a book, whereas I’ll read my reviews from later years simply to amuse myself with my own writing. (Or facepalm, because how in the hell have I let that sentence fragment live long enough to get a driving license?)

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The Old Lion

Posted on October 21, 2024 by smellincoffee
“Write what people want to hear, especially about me. Reality can be ugly.”

Imagine if someone wrote a fictional biography of Chuck Norris, but they used the internet legend version of Norris as their inspiration rather than the actor himself. That’s what impression The Old Lion gives me, frankly, a worshipful depiction of Teddy Roosevelt in which his only fault is loving his first wife too much and not being able to be there for her namesake daughter in her youth. Teddy is always, always, morally admirable. Born a weak child? By God, he shall lift weights and make himself better! He has absolutely no 19th century prejudices at all, he is a friend of all mankind — and to women, too, who only don’t have the vote because other men are afraid of them. Teddy isn’t, though, because he’s a lion — a hero, a legend. He has all the right opinions and he hates all the right people and he is not believable for one minute.

As a novel, this has its interests. There’s a lot of focus on Teddy in the West, and whereas I’d assumed Teddy had a rather passive role there, playing cowboy using his money while other men did the work, Shaara has Teddy playing the lead role in a 1950s western, complete with hauling dangerous criminals across the landscape all night so they can be given a fair trial instead of simply being hanged for being low-down no-good horse thieves. (Even the thieves asked him why he’s bothering to go through all this work, at which point he harrumphs about the importance of law and order in bringing civilization to the west.) We also see Teddyboy running around in the Spanish-American War (where he’s absolutely skeptical about the Maine but nontheless gung-ho about going to war to provide ‘leadership’ and inspire the other people of the Americas against European mischief). One segment of the Spanish war is especially interesting, as he has the idea of repurposing a giant kettle on a sugar plantation as cover against Gatlin guns. I didn’t realized how varied the man’s life was — he doesn’t get on a political train and follow it to the presidency, but goes back and forth between being a politician, cattleman, soldier, and so on. This offers constant change for the reader, but the more I progressed the less I cared about the story, simply because history was not being taken seriously: Roosevelt dismisses William Jennings Bryant as if he were Vermin Supreme rather than a man who became Secretary of State — and better yet, scoffs at Bryant’s reforms as ambitious nonsense when it was Teddyboy who had the megalomaniacal idea for using the government to force people in spelling English in some truncated manner that had caught his fancy. Things like this made me feel that Shaara was simply not invested in the zeitgeist he was writing about, because ignoring the draw of Bryant’s populism makes as much sense as ignoring say, the labor movement in that same time period.

Despite enjoying parts of this, its version of Teddy struck as too simplistic and worshipful, not plausible given the times he lived and worked in. Admittedly, I’ve never read a full biography of Roosevelt, but it strikes me as improbable a 19th century aristocrat would have the same views on native Americans, blacks, women, etc as a 1990s politician would. Shaara does season in some reality later in the book, when Roosevelt invites Booker T. Washington to the White House and Washington quotes some of the real TR’s racial remarks at him — remarks which seem disconnected from the race-blind Teddy of the early novel — only for Roosevelt to declare that men change. There are other details that show Shaara’s research — Teddy’s referring to Alice Jr consistently as “Baby Lee”, since her mother’s death traumatized him, and some of his verbal tics. As it happens, I more or less like Teddy, despite the fact that if I mention him on this blog it tend to be a critical observation: despite his influence on creating the imperial presidency, his own passion for expanding the empire of DC far beyond what the poor benighted Republic could bear, I find him generally admirable as a man. Spirited, disciplined, pugnacious, driven: even when he was shot he turned it into an opportunity to campaign, declaring that “You can’t stop a bull moose!”. He’s just too ‘lionized’ in this novel for my comfort.

Bottom line: it’s an enjoyable novel, just don’t take it too seriously.

Highlights:

“But I admit, I’m drawn to the notion of a life in politics. To perform a service that benefits the entire people…” The word seemed to surprise his mother.
“Politics? Your father did great good for an enormous number of people with charity work, advancing the culture in less dreadful ways. He considered the professional politician to be a man with no other opportunities in his life except to defraud and scandalize the people who could be persuaded to give him their vote. They are scoundrels, all of them.”

“[…] a few of us thought he had a chance of winning the nomination, and maybe even the presidency. I’m still convinced he’d be a lot more effective leader than Blaine. But the convention had already been decided, long before we got there, long before anybody had a real chance to be heard. It’s like when you wade out into the edge of the ocean and try to stay upright against a big wave. Not likely. The wave broke over us.”

“If politics is to be my lifeblood, I must do it on my own terms, and I will find a way to survive. If it is not in my future, well, I have my cattle. And a clear conscience.”

“You want to lead the dance, you have to step on some toes.”‘

“I rather thrive on chaos, especially when I can push it onto someone else. Politics lends itself quite well to chaos. If everybody agreed on everything, if everybody trusted everyone else, nothing would get done. Makes no sense, I bet, eh? But it’s chaos that forces deals to be made, agreements to be forged, usually in some sweaty, smoky back room. You want to prevail in politics, you stay just a bit outside the chaos, let them come to you.”

“I could fix this. I know damn well I could.”
“Sir, you can’t. It’s a private matter. Government can’t become involved.”
“I didn’t say government. I said me.”

Recording of Teddy:

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Against the Machine: a weekend of mysticism and wonder

Posted on October 20, 2024 by smellincoffee
  1. Friday, October 18th
  2. Books! Books! Books!
  3. Saturday, October 19th

This past weekend I had a rare opportunity to meet not two, but three authors, two of whom I’d read previously and one of whom I consider my favorites. Some months ago Rod Dreher, author of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, How Dante Can Save your Life, and Live not by Lies, announced that he would be speaking in Birmingham along with Paul Kingsnorth as part of a multi-day event (“Resisting the Machine”) that would culminate in the booklaunch of Dreher’s Living in Wonder, on the human need for enchantment and the sometimes dangerous ways people are pursuing it in the current day. Kingsnorth is not an author I’ve read a lot of: I encountered him first via his editing of Wendell Berry’s essays, The World-Ending Fire, and then began reading his blog, an eco-Orthodox attack on the “nexus of power, wealth, and technology”.

Paul Kingsnorth, Orthodox tech critic and mystic; Rod Dreher, journalist and author; Jason Baxter, classicist & CS Lewis scholar

Friday, October 18th

The evening kicked off with a talk from Paul Kingsnorth, whose substack writing is an interesting mix of environmentalism, Christian humanism, and sharp criticism of industrial technology and its effects on human civilization. Paul outstrips even me in his hatred for cell-phones, volunteering to smash anyone’s smartphone if they’d like. (Rod held his close and gasped: “My preccious!”) The talk was principally about Kingsnorth’s conception of The Machine, but then shifted from this very broad view (of the Machine now being an international beast) to how smartphones and social media deform us at the microlevel. He urged those of us in the audience to ‘repent’ — to literally begin turning away from these devices and the compulsive, consumerist, vicious behaviors they inculcate in us. After Paul’s talk, he was then joined on stage by Rod and Baxter: Rod essentially interviewed Paul, with Baxter piping up a time or two: here, Paul’s view of the Machine was connected to Dreher’s own soon-to-be-released title, as living in meaning & wonder are the opposite of living as machine-creatures, self-absorbed and forever running on the hamsterwheel of modernity. The third fellow, Baxter, is author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, a book I’ve thought about buying frequently: I wound buying it after the talk. When Rod does a write-up on the interview I’ll link to it here, and if it’s paywalled just let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send a few choice excerpts your way.

Books! Books! Books!

Check out some of these books! When I saw Ed Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Neil Postman mixed in with a gob-smacking variety of Christian culture books, I knew I was among my people.Eighth Day Books is the vendor if you’d like to check them out.

Note to self: really need to finish Anxious Generation and re-read Bad Therapy. And look, Nicholas Carr! He and Neil Postman are the founding fathers of my own tech-wariness.

After the discussion, I mingled in the hallway where all the books were. Rod passed behind the table, and I impulsively said “Hey, Rod!” like we knew each other. I do, in a sense: I’ve read his thoughts and reflections for years now, and for me it was surreal seeing That Man/Voice from the Internet suddenly a baseball’s throw away from me, with the same wild hair and black eyeglasses as his photo. Although I’ve already preordered the Kindle version of Living in Wonder, I grabbed a physical copy so I could get it autographed and have a chance to talk to Rod. He and I have very similar backgrounds, in that we’re both boys from the deep south who were really bad at being rednecks, much preferring books, writing, and classical music to Budweiser, football, and spending winter weekends in dark woods freezing while waiting for a shot at a deer. I’ve always felt a strong resonance with his writing, then, especially in his difficulties relating to his family — and despite my conflicted response to Crunchy Cons, he’s grown to be one of my very favorite authors. His How Dante Can Save Your Life landed a key time for me, and inspired me to finish the Commedia. The only other author I’ve traveled to see was Tom Woods, in 2015 at the Young Americans for Liberty conference. In addition to a print copy of Living in Wonder, I also bought the CS Lewis book — though I waited until I was back in my air bnb room (oddly enough, owned by a member of Holy Cross, Holy Trinity) to buy it as a Kindle title. (I plan on re-reading Crunch Cons: as with many books I read in 2013, I imagine my perspective would be very different now, as back then I still associated conservatism ONLY with neo-cons. I was also mixed about Russell Kirk that year, and yet Dreher and Kirk have remained constant presences in my mind ever since.)

Two crazy southern boys

Saturday, October 19th

The next morning, I attended a 7 am “Akathist to Jesus, Light to Those in Darkness” service at Holy Cross, Holy Trinity Orthodox in downtown Birmingham. They were the hosts of the next part of the event, a breakfast followed by another Kingsnorth-Dreher discussion which would be followed by a question and answer period.

(Taken after the event.) Although I’m faintly familiar with Orthodoxy through reading authors like Frederica Mathews-Green and Timothy Ware, as as Rod’s own writing (he converted from Roman Catholicism in the 2000s), this service was ..otherworldly. The first half-hour was essentially silent prayer, as a priest fussed around in the sanctuary. I have no idea what he was doing, because this wasn’t Divine Liturgy: once the service started, we were standing and meditating on the chants three men were doing, which took us through passages of the Gospels in which people called to Jesus for help in their despair/illness/sorrow, etc. I was very much moved by this for personal reasons I won’t go into, but suffice to say between the chanting and the incense I can definitely see being enraptured by Orthodox worship. I was mildly surprised not to see Paul or Rod in the audience, though I figured they wanted to avoid turning a religious service into a “meet the author” event. Lo and behold, though, when I turned around at the dismissal, I got a jump scare because they were right behind me, against the back wall. It’s a standing service, so I suppose they didn’t need a pew. If you look at that picture above, it’s fascinating because the presentation of the sanctuary is three-dimensional: there’s the Theotokos in the far back, of course, but she’s surrounded by an entirely different artwork depicting the Apostles (I’m assuming), and they’re all looking down on a Crucifix. All of these works are separate and distinct — and yet, conjoined in a powerful way.

“One especially promising book is —-
“WE CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
“What? Oh. The Mountain of Silence. The machine is fighting back.”

After this, we proceeded to the “Banquet Hall”, where we had breakfast, followed by another discussion between the authors. This one was more tightly focused on the difference between “precept” and “concept”, and specifically the way western Christianity has focused on latter over the former: to reference Pogle’s The Church Impotent, essentially western Christianity became fixated on “mental” aspects — apologetics — it drifted away from experiential aspects of Christianity, aside from some some mystics. If Christian faith is to triumph against the machine, it must incorporate body, mind, and spirit — not be dominated simply by syllogisms. I can testify to this to some degree, as it wasn’t until I had my own touching-a-live-wire experience that I began to open to becoming a Christian — and C.S. Lewis, too, had to wait until he’d been ‘surprised by joy’, this bolt he could not account for, before Tolkien and others could frame his experience with argument and convinced him to begin practicing as a Christian. Dreher’s entire religious experience has been punctuated with such moments, beginning with his being overwhelmed by Chartres, and more recently in later years, a series of events related to the life of St. Golgano, which I’m familiar with through his substack but which he related during one of the discussions. After this, I met with a dear friend for lunch at a restaurant Rod recommended, then sallied forth home.

It’s Frederica Mathews-Green! (…she’s written books on Eastern Orthodoxy, a few of which I’ve read.) And a replica of the Shroud of Turin. Unexpected.

It was quite the weekend. I greatly enjoyed being among likeminded people — not Christians, per se, but people who are deeply concerned about the way technology, industrialism, modernity, etc are warping humanity and taking us away from meaning and authenticity. This was something I was interested in long before I ever opened myself up to the Christian way, but Christianity — and particularly, the social doctrine of the Catholic church I discovered through Schumacher’s small is beautiful (available through Eighth Day Books!) — helped me understand the problem of modernity and the machine better. I imagine this next week will be marked by reading inspired by this weekend’s reflections and conversations.

Some videos, if you found all this interesting:

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How Librarians Will Save us All

Posted on October 17, 2024 by smellincoffee

As promised, I read This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Will Save us All, by Marilyn Johnson. Before getting into it, though, I found a very quick work on KU that amused me, so I’m sharing it here as well: I Work in a Public Library.

If you’ve ever worked at a public library for any length of time, you’ve no doubt encountered some strangers and even stranger incidences: my two favorites are the time traveler and the man who wandered inside wearing no pants or shoes but holding a belt. I assumed this would be along those lines, and I was correct — complete with some recurring characters, like “Cuckoo Cathy”. The book is a collection of funny quotes from patrons (the sort of thing you’d find at Overheard Everywhere Else, but library-focused) as well as amusing & bizaare anecdotes. Sheridan closes with more heart-warming stories, like of a man who returned to the library with gifts to thank libarians for helping him find a job, that sort of thing.

Quotes:

MAN: The volume. It keeps quacking instead of ringing. It’s really embarrassing. I think my grandkids got hold of it.
ME: I think I can fix that. [I take the phone, quickly go through the settings, and make a few changes. Then I show him the switch to quickly turn on and off the ringer.]
MAN: You are a miracle worker! If only you could fix my grandkids. They could use an on/off switch. Or a kick.

FIVE-YEAR-OLD: You got books on Al Capone? He led a crime cinnamon. MOTHER: Syndicate.

And now, the real subject of this post: This Book is Overdue! As a librarian who doubles as an IT dude, I was immediately drawn to this title. Written in 2007 or so, it’s a general tribute to librarians but especially those who were taking advantage of the computer & networking revolution to radically rethink approaches to library work. We start off slow, Johnson documenting the trials and tribulations of a library system changing its patron & collection management software, visit librarians who were playing with then-new software tools like chatboxes, and eventually find ourselves in “Second Life”, where librarians were creating digital libraries that offered the texts of materials that members of Second Life were looking for but couldn’t find in their own systems — or, for reasons of privacy or security, were afraid to ask for in person. The setting in the early terror war period also gives librarians a chance to shine as frustrators of the goonie-boys: one section here features three anonymous librarians refusing to comply with orders from the fibs to hand over patron records. In more fun sections, Johnson dives into the digital world that librarians were creating — invading the bloggosphere and creating a community of blogs commenting on serious issues, venting steam about patrons and city councils, or just goofing off. Unfortunately, most of the blogs mentioned are long since dead, though it’s possible to use the Wayback Machine to gain some limited access. One blog that is still extant is “Tales from the Liberry“, though it’s dormant. My guess is that the social energy of the library-blogging sphere shifted into things like facebook groups, as I’m a member of so many library-focused groups that my feed is sometimes nothing but library programming ideas, book displays, baseball news, and photos of trains. This was a fun look back at how libraries began embracing the digital revolution, with a lot of laughs.

Coming up: I’m attending a book launch this weekend for Living in Wonder with Paul Kingsnorth & Rod Dreher, which should be interesting: I have the book preordered and will probably begin reading it next week, though I suspect it’s going to be a headier one than say, How Dante Can Save Your Life or The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.

Another post consisted entirely of “signs we never thought we’d need to make,” each of which told its own condensed story: While waiting for your ride home, do not set fire to your homework to keep warm. You may not take the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue into the washroom. Iguanas are not allowed in the building. If you are out of diapers, do not open the soiled diaper, scoop out the turd, leave the turd on a shelf, and then ask the librarian to tape the newly cleaned diaper closed again….

I was spending my life trying to focus on what was new in librarianship: new attitudes, new targets for outreach, the new issues and possibilities that computers in libraries represented. I didn’t want to be sitting in a sticky chair thinking about poop. Children, the homeless, smuggled-in soda bottles that spill all over the stacks, poop—these were all problems, as the academics would say, beyond the scope of my inquiry. And yet, here was poop.

Writers seldom just stop writing. We’re like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.

During the height of the debate about the Patriot Act, some librarians posted signs that were “technically legal,” slyly warning patrons that their privacy might be compromised: THE FBI HAS NOT BEEN HERE (watch very closely for the removal of this sign).

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The Dead Beat

Posted on October 16, 2024 by smellincoffee

Searching for obituaries is the most frequent kind of local history request I field at the library, and I like to joke when I’m disappearing into the archives room that I’m off hunting for dead people. I’ve noticed over the years that obituaries often rise to the quality of literature, and so I was immediately interested in this title. Written in the very early 2000s, it delivers both its intentional interest — obituaries and those that write them — as well as unintentional interest, in looking back to when the internet hadn’t ravaged papers big and small, and when the internet itself was a different experience: there’s an entire chapter here on the Usenet for obituary enthusiasts. Johnson examines obituaries in both the United States and Britain, and interviews notable obit-writers whose skill at capturing the life of the recently deceased had brought them some slim measure of fame. There is an art to the obituary in finding the appropriate facts & stories to create a sense of the person who perished, not merely reprise a staid series of facts about a funeral home entry. Although we read of celebrity deaths here, there’s a good focus on ordinary lives as well, especially in the section on 9/11 and the way the New York Times began honoring the lives of those murdered that day. Johnson also visits England’s principal papers, incuding The Economist, to see how their approaches vary. I enjoyed this title, but I suspect its audience is limited.

Coming up: another title by Johnson, this one on the messy tango between librarians and computers.

One of my favorite obituaries spotted in papers, this one from 1907:

In these mercenary days, others might lower the high ideals of the brave old days and become worshipers of Ba’al, but not he. In the country of his youth and young manhood, Honor was king and kindness, courtest, truth, and courage were his ministers. What wonder, then, that these ruled his whole life and made him noted throughout the Black Belt of Alabama. To offer him an insult was to take a Numidian lion by the beard: and he has been known as one that would uphold his principles on the field of honor. And now the brave and generous heart is stilled forever. We shall not soon forget him, for he was a rare man and one whose like we shall not soon see again. May he sleep restfully under the magnolias until that final day when each shall receive his just reward.

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on October 16, 2024 by smellincoffee

WHAT are you reading? Um. I just finished a book and haven’t gotten into anything just yet. Well, I’m still technically reading The Anxious Generation but I’m overwhelmed with schoolwork at the moment and can’t take anything too serious. This is the absolute randomness that is my Kindle bookshelf at the moment:

WHAT have you finished recently? The Dead Beat, a tribute to obituaries and obituary writers.

WHAT are you reading next? Really should be All Power to the Councils! or Germany 1923, for my planned Germany Between the Wars series of reviews, but as mentioned I’m crazy busy with school and reading about Communists and Nazis hijacking Germany’s first democracy is not an ideal counterpoint to all of the articles I’m having to read and digest and turn into a paper.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is: What has improved since you were a kid? and I can only answer: MY ACCESS TO MUSIC. Before the internet, my music experience consisted of listening to terrestrial radio with a cassette tape at the ready so I could hit record when I heard a song I liked, and buying $10 cassette tapes and $15 CDs at Walmart. (My first cassette: Best of Beethoven. First CD….Charttoppers of the 1950s.) Once the internet became a thing, not only was it a lot easier to explore new music — like hypothetically typing in an artist’s name into Limewire and then listening to different tracks, not that I ever did such a thing. Someone who did might realize that a lot of people are quite stupid and will label a track as being by Frank Sinatra or Perry Como when they’re actually by Tony Bennett. I don’t speak from direct experience, of course. Then Pandora came along and could create playlists based on songs you liked, using their ‘musical genome’, and then Youtube and Spotify and all that came into being as well. Youtube has become the main way I find new music via the ‘related’ section.

And here are five artists I found via YouTube.

Merle Haggard said heaven was a drink of wine, but I’d settle with watching Rachael Price sing.
I was born on this mountain, this mountain’s my home
She holds me and keeps me from worry and woe
Well, they took everything that she gave, now they’re gone
But I’ll die on this mountain, this mountain’s my home
Allison Young is so adorable.
I want you one last time
Another hit to ease my mind
I don’t want you to be over yet
Won’t you be my last cigarette?
If I ever find myself in New Orleans, Chloe will be to blame.
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Top Ten Books I Read in School

Posted on October 14, 2024 by smellincoffee

And by “top ten”, I mean “the first ten books that floated up from the depths of memory”. But first, the tease!

The professional whistler” alone would make the obit interesting, but to also have Hitler, Frank Sinatra, and a sex-change operation (in a Cairo clinic!) is outrageous. The business about dying “aged 80” sits in the middle of the sentence, British style. (The Dead Beat: Lucky Stiffs, Lost Souls, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries).

Okay, so — books I read because of school!

A composite of five book covers, featuring Island of the Blue Dolphins, Goosebumps: The Beast from the East, Animal Farm, Mephisto, and The Grapes of Wrath

(1) Island of the Blue Dolphins. I remember nothing about this book other than being surprised I liked it.

(2) Bridge to Terabithia. Assigned summer reading. Can’t remember a blessed thing about it.

(3) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Assigned summer reading in between 3rd and 4th grade. My first encounter with C.S. Lewis, though I didn’t read the series in full until much later — when I was beginning my thirties.

(4) Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls. My fifth-grade teacher read this to us over the course of a few weeks and it remains one of the most leaky-eyeball books I’ve ever read.

(5) Animal Farm, George Orwell. Read in fifth or sixth grade, and it improved enormously when I re-read it in high school after becoming familiar with the Soviets. This is one I should revisit.

(6) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. This book is forever linked to 9/11 for me, because my class discussion of it was interrupted by an aid from the office coming in to tell the teacher the news. Read it again a few years ago and enjoyed it tremendously.

(7) Goosebumps: The Beast from the East. Why my brain remembers that my fifth grade teacher read this specific Goosebumps title to us, I have no idea. (I suspect it has something to do with kid-me having a teacher crush.)

(8) The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Listening to my teacher bring scenes to life in tenth-grade world literature is the first time I remember being impressed by a teacher’s skills. She really made me aware of how much is happening in the scene in which Caesar is stabbed — people shouting questions and vying for his attention.

(9) Mephisto. Read for a college-level German history course. The chilling story of an artist who sells his soul to the Nazi party for pelf & place. Re-read a few years ago.

(10) A Life of her Own, Emile Carles. The memoir of a French woman from a rural village who became a teacher through two world wars: this book was my introduction to the left, libertarianism, and pacifism. It made me much more critical of the state and far more interested in reading about political philosophy, and it’s one of my few college class books that I’ve retained. One to re-read.

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Over my Dead Body: American Cemeteries

Posted on October 12, 2024 by smellincoffee

“There is glory in graves; there is grandeur in gloom”. So begins a poem inscribed on an elaborate tombstone in my favorite cemetery, Selma’s own Old Live Oak. Perhaps it was growing up in a city with such a picturesque cemetery that gave me my interest in them — at least, old ones. Modern cemeteries made for machines — and specifically, with no monuments and memorial stones designed so that lawnmowers can pass over them — hold zero interest for me. Given that it’s spooky season, I thought it might be interesting to look for a history of cemeteries. Over my Dead Body is a mix of cemetery history and cemetery tourism, though the history is sketchy and the tourism is mostly prominent places like Hollywood’s celebrity necropolis or — interestingly — Central Park. I enjoyed it in parts, but not consistently, and developed an acute dislike for the author’s frequent personal anecdotes about eating vegan at his friends’ house or boring his daughter wih dad-jokes. Other readers’ taste may vary.

Although there’s a chronological orientation to this book, it’s not a straightfoward history of American cemeteries. We do begin with Mississippi mound-builders and the graves at Jamestown and end with a modern push for ecologically-friendly burial practices, but in between it’s more focused on the ‘hidden history’ aspect, and not so much American cemeteries in general. There’s a chapter on the destruction of native American gravesites, for instance, a look at segregation’s expression in burial practices, the role of Chinese labor in the west, and so on. A few chapters do serve to illustrate American funerary practice in general, like the section on how the American Civil War changed perceptions about death and began leading to embalming becoming more popular, to the point that the grotesque practice is now the default option in the US (and no where else, thankfully), but it’s more focused on special subjects. I enjoyed the book when it was focused on the cemeteries, as the more I read the more suspicious I became about its merits as a history: he attributes Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg National Cemetary to bolstering the president’s reelection bid, and not, say, Sherman’s successful drive into Georgia during the election season. His treatment of the Civil War is uniformly egregious, so that’s not surprising.

While I enjoyed this in parts, I found the author more annoying than not — in his frequent off-topic anecdotes, in his modern contempt for anyone in the past who didn’t have the right politics — and was disappointed by the book’s contents, which focus either on small topics or are only connected to metropolitan cemeteries. There’s little here on the ordinary history of cemeteries, or how they may reflect their region’s culture — like the use of shells as decor in coastal cemetaries, say. There are some interesting stories in here, like Central Park’s popularity as a place to disperse ashes, but it’s not one I’ll remember and reccommend.

Coming up:…I’m going back to a book I started last year for spooky season, a celebration of obituary writers. I’ve read the author previously, so I’m looking forward to it.

Related:
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (and Other Lessons from the Crematorium). A much better history of funerary practices in America.

Quotes:

Cremation in the ancient world was difficult and dependent on an ample supply of trees. The human body is two-thirds water, after all, and it takes about 1,000 pounds of wood to produce enough heat to turn one person to ashes.

For me, romance involves seeing dead people. For my wife, Ann Marie, a physician who generally likes to keep people alive, not so much.

A body buried in America today doesn’t actually become food for worms or push up daisies. Typical graves are like mini Superfund sites. America deposits about 4.3 million gallons of toxic embalming fluids—including 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde—into the ground yearly, according to the Green Burial Council. We also inter 20 million board feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and 81,000 tons of metal. In addition, human
remains contain mercury from fillings, metals from pacemakers and other devices, and potent pharmaceuticals like chemotherapy drugs, which leach into the soil. Then there are the chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides cemeteries use to keep the grass above the graves looking pristine, which requires regular mowing from exhaust-belching, fossil-fuel guzzling machines.

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Ghosts on the Titanic

Posted on October 11, 2024 by smellincoffee

Billionaire Jackson Riggs has a plan: raise the Titanic! Currents and bacteria are steadily eating away at it, so if the Mary Rose can be brought to surface, why not the big T? (Well, 40 feet versus 12,500 feet….) So he does, to no international friction whatsoever beyond a reporter asking him if he feels strange at all disturbing a mass grave. The ruin (presumably just the bow, since the stern is a crumbled mess) is put on display in the very shipyards that built it, and the locals — demonstrating an astonishing knowledge of history — are a bit uncomfortable with that. It’s like the doomed ship has come back to haunt the community that built it. And…so it has, because not only do bits of the ship begin falling off and destroying people (tut tut, they should’ve worn gloves and helmets), but then people began committing suicides-by-drowning at 2:20 am, the very minute that Titanic surrendered to the cold deep of Oceanus. Evidently the ol’ girl still possesses the spirits of those who died aboard her, and they’re taking out their revenge on the descendants of those who built her!

…and that’s the story. It’s really just a novella. Can’t say I was impressed by it: the initial premise is interesting, but there’s no consideration given on how difficult an enterprise raising a substantial part of the Titanic would be, either from a physical point of view or from the fact that outcry would be huge. At the moment robots can photograph the interior of the bow and do shot-for-shot comparisons, seeing things as they were — if sunk. Begin moving the ship, though, and all manner of disturbance is going to happen inside, so I can imagine the scientific community alone getting incensed about this prospect. We see none of that here, though, and the mass suicides are only creepy when we witness the first one, and after that there’s a lot of cops wandering around thinking all this is really weird, and then someone else dies a different way and the story ends. There’s no unearthly whispering, no ghostly eyes of Captain Smith staring in recrimination at the billionaire, nothing really horror-like save for the first drowning scene. It’s not a developed story, to be frank.

On the bright side, this book made me aware that the Mary Rose wreck exists!

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on October 9, 2024 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Precipice, Robert Harris. I found it enjoyable enough to finish, but it was distinctly underwhelming.

WHAT are you reading now? In addition to the things I’ve started but have not yet continued in earnest, I just picked up a Mafia history called Borgata: Rise of Empire, A History of the American Mafia. It’s a history of the Mafia by someone who was imprisoned for being a member of la cosa nostra. While I’m not particularly impressed by the tone (it’s extremely casual for a history), so far I’ve liked his dive into Sicilian history and its importance in shaping the origins of Mafia culture. I should not be reading about the Mafia, I should be reading about inter-war Germany.

WHAT are you reading next? In addition to the things I should be reading, I just saw another Titanic horror novella (how is this a genre), an alt-history in which Germany seizes Paris early on, annnnd Abraham Lincoln but with vampires. The last title would be of no interest except for the fact that it’s October, i.e. Spooky Season. Amazon also gave me a book for being a Prime subscriber, which is about the Very Secret Science being done at Los Alamos in the 1940s. I should pair it by watching Oppenheimer. Oh, and I’ll probably start The Grandest Stage, a history of the World Series, this month, given that the series will be starting in a few. My Red Sox didn’t make it, so I’ll be rooting for the Braves (my closest regional team) and the Orioles (who have a local boy playing).

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is….”something that was better when you were a kid”. Well, I didn’t have to listen to people’s inane phone conversations literally everywhere there are people. That was nice. Even better, people were walking around, not shuffling along staring down at a device 10 hours a day, or blocking an entire aisle in the store because they’d decided that This is The Place to have an extended conversation about medical matters while their cart is parked sideways. Nevermind the strangers who just want to get past and get some coffee or pickled okra or what-have-you. (Yes, I’m a crank. I’d tell you to get off my lawn but I’d honestly be relieved you were outside instead of screen-bathing.)

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