When checking Amazon for the Old Man’s War series, I noticed a new short story series created by Amazon. I’ve read their FORWARD and WARMER collections before and figured this might be fun. Unfortunately, this skewed more toward the level of WARMER than FORWARD, as I only enjoyed a few of the pieces and even one of those was confusing.
“3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years”, John Scalzi
If you could be a tourist in the past, where would you go? Personally, I’d want to visit North America prior to the arrival of humans from the Bering Strait, so to witness the megafauna at the time. Pity it would probably eat me. “3 Days” takes us to a world where time travel is possible, but with limitations. Nothing we do in the past shapes our timeline, and there are only three opportunities to come back — windows that open three days, nine months, or twenty seven years from departure. When a tourist goes back into time, they are free to do whatever they like: kill Hitler, flirt with Napoleon, try to introduce a tank into the Punic Wars and see what happens. Some perish in the times they visit; others find out that if you kill a painter in 1920s Vienna, you’ll find yourself arrested for murder, not hailed as the savior of western civilization. “3 Days (etc)” at first seems like it’s just entertaining readers with the premise, but then delivers a twist.
For his sake, I hope he was indeed eaten by his preferred dinosaur. It would be terrible to plan one’s own death between the jaws of one of the most fearsome predators to live, only to trip up and be consumed by something less majestic.
Except for that one client who traveled to another reality expressly to walk up to the younger alternate version of themself and punch them square in the teeth. The client did not explain themself to their other version. They did not explain themself to the organization in the debrief afterward. But I never did see a client happier with their experience.
“Making Space”, R.F. Kuang
An infertile couple finds a child in the woods looking like he’s escaped captivity: what they don’t realize is that their frustrating, suburban world is Eden to a child who comes from a far less hospitable future. Aside from the main character’s compassion for the child, this wasn’t particularly compelling and I hated the way the story developed.
“For a Limited Time Only”, Peng Shephard
A salesman named Russ works for an ad and product placement company with a twist: it can send people small amounts back in time to manipulate markets and help its clients steal a march on the competition. Most of the story is about character drama, though — Russ witnessing two of his friends’ relationship fall apart, and experiencing ups and downs with his own daughter. Because of the nature of his work, though — constantly moving through time — sometimes his daughter is two, sometimes nine, etc. Sometimes one friend is dead, sometimes alive. Although the story wound up being compelling, the temporal ‘jumps’ are so chronic and often unannounced that I was often confused.
Oracle has two main departments: Past and Futures. Including Vik and me, there are probably fifty employees in Past, and I have no idea how many in Futures, other than Theresa. Most of them, we’ll never meet, because they haven’t even been hired yet.
“A Visit to the Husband Archive”, Kaliane Bradley.
Unique in these stories, “Visit” has a double premise: the media is thrown into a confusing world where many characters appear to be chronic amnesiacs, doing manual labor and living in a brief window of ‘now’ surrounded by mental fog. As the story progresses, we learn about an extraterrestrial element that also involves time.
“All Manner of Thing Shall Be”, Olivie Blake
I…I don’t even know how to start with this one. We have some eccentric personalities living in a house together who all transform into some kind of flesh-eating ghouls at sundown, and time is also involved. Not enjoyable, aside from this quote:
There was a trend going around on the latest app—ingenious, really, the way someone had built the algorithm to do the work of a million, perhaps even a billion psychic vampires; the way it could drain the life force from anyone and yet still continually feed, its prey returning willingly for more. In another life, Esther thought, or perhaps in a century or so, when she tired of her educational ventures, she might look into the neurology of it all, though presumably by then everyone would be permanently slumped over, comatose save for the dim blue light of their insatiable devices.
“Cronus”, P. Djèlí Clark
A short story set in an alternate history where segregation in the United States never ended, and people are comically hateful. There doesn’t appear to be one point of deviation: instead, several “switch” moment in history, like the Brown v Board of Education decision and Jackie Robinson signing on with Brooklyn, don’t activate. As the story develops, we realize that a time travel tourism company has been used to alter the past — but memories from the original timeline keep surfacing and causing problems. The main character, Annie, is contacted by a resistance group who want her to use her position as a clerk at the company to help.
All of these were 38 – 48 pages and readable in one sitting.
Well, so ends October! In Alabama cooler weather finally began drawing near, though it’s rare for it to come inside and take a seat so soon. The cold actually kicked the door down last night: it’s 38 (3 C) at present. I’ve been going to work in my cardigan but this morning I’ll have to bust out my coat for the first time since March! It was an odd month on the blog, with a mix of history, SF, and some weird alt-history/SF tales. Personally, the month was hit and miss, with one highlight being my suddenly making progress on a short story I’d been picking at for close to two years. (I say short: it’s ~14500 words now and I’m stalled on the critical final section.)
It is my intention to finish the survey next month. I have a book on zombie bugs I’d intended to post for Halloween, but got distracted.
The Unreviewed
Starry Messenger is an unusual piece, more of a collection of thoughts of how to apply scientific thinking to everyday life and issues — like debating vegetarianism or gambling. I kind of miss Tyson: I used to listen to his StarTalk Radio podcast, but he has comedian co-hosts for pop culture appeal, and they’d just make the show obnoxious. It was an OK way to pass the time, but frankly rather forgettable.
The latter three were all found at Fair Oaks Books, Selma’s indie bookstore. I had planned on getting the Wendell Berry release, but my lady-friend suggested that I not, so that’s something to look forward to in December, I think.
Coming up in November….Science Fiction!
Several blogs are hosting a “SciFi Month” month, which will include a series of prompts to respond to for the month, and the first prompt is to share our SF TBR for the month! These are some possibilities:
(1) Maybe Becky Chambers. I’ve checked out one of her titles several times this year but haven’t actually committed to it; it’s next in Wayfaring Strangers.
(2) More Ursula le Guin. I read her The Dispossessed but keep meaning to tackle The Left Hand of Darkness.
(3) Delta-V, Daniel Suarez.
(4) Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
(5) Check on John Scalzi to see what the next Old Man’s War book is.
(6) I’ve been told Ramez Naam is Suarez-like, so I may try his Nexus book.
(7) Maybe some Heinlein? I’ve read a few of his works (Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, etc) but none of his Lazarus Long titles.
(8) The Duke of Calladan, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson. A Dune prequel novel about Duke Leto. I know I’m supposed to read Dune Messiah first, but honestly the whole space jihad-genocide thing isn’t that attractive.
(9) John Carter of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read a third of this last year when I was doing Science Fiction Book Bingo, and may revisit it just for temporal variety.
(10) All Systems Red, first in the “Murderbot” stories. Both Amazon and ChatGPT tell me I would like this.
Now, readers who have been with me for a while know perfectly well that I won’t complete this list, that it’s perfectly plausible that I’ll read something and then go off on a completely unrelated tangent — but I’d like to at least match last year’s SF Month mark of six books. We’ll see! Are you joining in this year? There’s plenty of room on board.
Rush Hour 2, 2001. I watched this a few times back in the day, but it’s been fifteen, twenty years I’d say. I remembered it for three things: one, a ridiculous fight scene in a massage parlor in which two men fight off a small army of Triad goons dressed in short bathrobes and towels; two, the female actresses, and three, a hysterical exchange between detectives Carter and Lee after they bump into one another after a long separation in which Lee believes Carter was killed during an explosion.
Carter: Who died, Lee? Lee: You! Carter: Detective Yu? Lee: Not Yu, you! Carter: Who? Lee: You! Carter: Who? Lee: Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?! Carter:Don’t nobody understand the words that are comin’ out of your mouth!
It reminds me of a “Who’s on First” routine starring George W. Bush. There are many plot oddities, like a Secret Service dude ordering an LAPD detective who is on vacation to go back to the States, and said SS dude telling a Hong Kong special inspector that he’s off the case. Also, there’s the fact that Ricky Tan, who is supposedly the former partner of Lee’s father (also an inspector) looks a decade or so younger than Lee. On the bright side, it was nice to see pre 9/11 airports. Jeremy Piven has a minor but very memorable role as a Versace salesman: he was later a major supporting member of Chasing Liberty. I also appreciated that the Netflix version includes outtakes and bloopers, like “Daaaaaamn! He ain’t gonna be in Rush Hour 3!”
Chasing Liberty, 2004. Mandy Moore plays the American president’s daughter, who feels smothered by her SS detail and decides to ditch them while in Prague; she flees with the assistance of Matthew Goode, who unbeknownst to her is a plainclothes SS man. Believe it or not, this is a rewatch for me, and a rewatch many times over back when I was younger. As someone still in his teens but moving quickly toward young adulthood, I loved the idea of going on this spontaneous adventure across Europe – seeing beauty, meeting interesting people, finding what was real. There were a lot of perks in the movie, too: I greatly enjoyed the actors who played the principal SS men, especially Jeremy Piven, and Mark Harmon features as the president. This film was also my introduction to Matthew Goode, who I later enjoyed in Imagine Me and You – and then much later, Match Point, The Imitation Game, &c. There are some great minor characters in this like Scotty MacGruff, who makes a habit of slapping Six Million Dollar Man stickers on things. We can rebuild him! We have the technology! The story is fairly absorbing: Goode and Moore’s characters fall in love, which is a big problem for Goode given that he’s basically deceived her and he’s in love with his boss’s daughter.
McGruff: Hey, chilly-willy, Squabblers, take a few of these on your solo travels then. Ben: What are these? Six-Million-Dollar Man stickers? McGruff: These stickers are my contribution to the global community. Everyone I meet gets a handful. Your job: post them up! Pound one on a door, slap one on a kiosk, place one on a postbox, wherever your life may lead you. Anna: And then what? McGruff: Then, nothing. You forget about the sticker, you move on. One day, maybe you’re a little down in the dregs, and all of a sudden, there it is! The corner of a window, the door of a subway, the side of a telephone booth, one of the stickers. And it puts a smile of your face because you know you are not alone in the world; we’re all connected. Ben: Wanker.
Morales: No, no, no, let me ask you something, Weiss. Do you actually get women like this? I was really curious if there were actually women out there in the world who walk by the construction lunch break which is your very personality and say: “Oh, yeah, please. Baby, give it to me. Give me some of that hard hat, right here, right now.” There are actually women like that? Weiss: A couple.
36 Hours, 1964. A rewatch for me, though it’s been over a decade since my late friend Al Benn first introduced me to it back in 2011 or so. In this movie, a senior American military officer wakes up in what seems to be a U.S. Army hospital in 1950 after supposedly spending several years in a coma. The medical staff fuss over him and soon begin asking curious questions about what he remembers. Specifically: D-Day. Where did the troops land? How many were there, bitte? …Bitte? Ach, du lieber!
Where Eagles Dare, 1969. Broadsword calling Danny Boy! This is a crazy-fun WW2 spy thriller in which Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton blow the hell out of a bunch of Nasties amid twist after twist. (Quote Clint Eastwoood: “Major, you’ve got me as confused as I ever hope to be.”) It’s also probably the WW2 movie I’ve watched the most times: I had a VHS in high school and loved it. Mind, at the same time I was also playing Commandos and Medal of Honor….
Office Space, 1999. A many-times rewatch: I’ve been watching this film on and off for ….20 years. It’s a black comedy about the inhumanity of office work, I suppose? Lawrence remains my favorite character. (“Hell, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothin’, man. Look at my cousin. He’s broke and he don’t do ____!”)
Elephant, 2003. A psychological drama based heavily on the Columbine massacre, a failed bombing turned shooting that has become the …iconic? …school shooting. The film is unusual in that it’s not a straight movie; this isn’t a 9/11 movie or a Pearl Harbor movie where we’re seeing characters Do Things and Change the Plot. Instead, we’re observers, with the majority of the film being tracking shots. These shots are often from behind the character, like we’re following them, and the intent is to…”experience” a Columbine-like event not as a movie, but as if it were happening to us. Accordingly, most of the film is watching characters do routine stuff: one guy is walking around campus taking photos for his film project, a guy has come to school late because his dad was drunk and he had to make arrangements, etc. And then….what happens, happens, and it’s an abrupt change.
The film creates ambiguity by moving the setting to autumn Oregon (instead of spring Colorado), and having its characters not be named after the two RL cretins, and there are ups and downs. I was glad it included the failed-bombing aspects (the IRL guys planned to blow up the school, then use their guns to sweep survivors coming out of the doors), but it did play to the contemporary narrative that the perps were poor widdle socially abwused loners who lashed out. In reality, one of them was a popular sociopath and the other was played like a fiddle by the sociopath, but given how quickly this movie came out that’s forgivable. I watched it for the director and the interesting perspective shift, buuuut I was also a middle schooler when Columbine happened and part of me was interested in seeing how they portrayed….that time as far as fashion and such. I know that’s weird, but I also rewatch Scream for nostalgia, so there you are. (…I watched Scream around this same time. Don’t tell my parents, they’ll never let me go over to Tim’s house again.) My only complaint is that the school was weirdly dark: some corridors look like they have no lights on at all. I don’t know if that was an artistic choice or not, but a lot of the dark areas did wind up being shooting galleries.
Somebody pay the light bill, honestly. Locker combinations were hard enough with GOOD lighting! (fun fact: the dialogue at this moment was “Oh, I’m going to the dark room to develop some shots.”)
Killing them Softly, 2012. A crime drama set during the financial crisis that preceded the Great Recession, but dealing with underworld financial issues instead. Ray Liotta’s high-stakes poker game has just been hit, and since he hit it himself a few years back, he’s the chief suspect. Who really did it was John Sacrimoni, who hires two losers (including Ben Mendelsohn as a bizarrely convincing dopehead) to do the dirty work for him. Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini are called in to find the guys and knock them off. This will be made slightly easier by the dopehead running his mouth. I watched this largely for Gandfolini, but if I had any doubts the presence of Liotta would have sold it. It’s a strangely paced movie: with 30 minutes left and little accomplished, Pitt and Gandolfini are sitting around drinking Scotch and talking about old girlfriends. It culminates in Obama giving his victory speech in 2008, which has a couple of levels of interest that I won’t get into because of spoilers.
Scream, 1996. Do you like scary movies? This is the kind of gory film I’d never watch today, but because I watched it in middle school (at a friend’s house, illicitly), it now has this strange nostalgia power that overrides everything. This film, for whatever reason, prompted me to try writing for the first time, and in middle school I had an entire three-ring binder filled with “horror” stories, with antagonists like ghosts and mutant spiders. One was about the wreck of a luxury train called The Titan (no points for guessing the inspiration given the context of the late 1990s) and I distinctly remember using a new vocabulary word, “gregarious”, to describe a character. Anyhoo, if you’ve been living under a rock for thirty years, this is a parody of slasher films that is “meta” in its delivery: characters are aware of slasher film tropes, including the killer who enjoys taunting their victims with them It’s dated and I love it for that: “Let me ask you this: what are you doin’ with a cellular phone, son?” I also love Matthew Lillard’s character acting in this: he was both charming and psychotic. It’s worth noting that this parody of horror films was the first time I’d ever seen a horror film – soon followed by I Know What You Did Last Summer.
I like Matthew Lillard’s acting in this entirely too much. (Language.)
“It’s the Millenium. Motives are incidental.”
The Rainmaker (1997). In 2000 or 2001, in creative writing class, this movie was my introduction to the works of John Grisham. It was also my first time seeing Matt Damon and Jon Voight, and it had a great soundtrack. (It wasn’t my introduction to Danny DeVito — I’d already seen Matilda.) Damon and Voight both pull off believable Southern accents. “Sworn in by a fool, and vouched for by a scoundrel. I’m a lawyer at last.” I’m amused by how much of the dialogue I still have memorized. This remains a wonderful movie: LegalEagle rated it an A+ for legal accuracy, and it’s completely compelling from a viewer’s perspective — the characters, the drama, and the writing all hold up. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it’s the one Grisham adaptation that really sticks in memory, while others — A Time to Kill, Runaway Jury — have mostly faded, aside from odd details like learning the word indigent from The Client. I’d rate this as possibly my favorite legal movie: not as funny as My Cousin Vinny, but a genuine David vs. Goliath story that helped shape my reflexive mistrust of corporations. It also stands out for showing the trial from soup to nuts — something no other Grisham story or adaptation quite managed.
Truth and Treason, 2025. A group of teenage German boys is inspired to begin creating circulars against Hitler in the early 1940s. The author of them is exposed when another document he’s written bears the same tell-tale typewriter defect as all of the circulars have. Although the leader is forced, under torture, to expose his colleagues, in the end he makes a brave decision that saves his soul if not his body. The movie is based on the true story of Helmuth Huebener.
The Firm, 1993. Probably my first Tom Cruise film and quite possibly my first Gene Hackman. Think I watched it in the very early 2000s. Not a great adaptation of the novel, but I enjoyed revisiting it. The Firmwas my first JG book, but as mentioned Rainmaker was my first JG movie. A young lawyer (Mitch McDeere aka Tom Cruise) receives an unbelievable offer from some boutique firm down South – only to realize that whoopsie doodle, this is a mob firm. Gene Hackman is prominent, as is Ed Harris – I’d forgotten Ed. He plays a real jerk, an aggressive FBI agent whose treatment of Mitch is no less bullying than the Mob’s. Amusingly, Paul Sorvino – who played Paulie in Goodfellas – appears here as a mobster. Whaddya wanna guess the wiseguy’s name is Paulie? (IDMB suggests his name was Tommy, like he was funny. Funny how, like he’s a clown, like he amuses you? Like he makes you laugh, like he’s here to amuse you?)
The Chamber, 1996. Christopher O’Donnell plays a young lawyer (Adam) who is trying to get an aged man (Gene Hackman) adjudicated guilty for bombing a Jewish law firm and killing two children off the death penalty. The twist? Said old man, Sam Cahill, is his granddaddy. Accordingly, he’s dealing with not only his soul-haunting questions, but the fact that his father killed himself and that his aunt who has tried to escape family history deep in the bottle. The book version of this was one of the single-most thought provoking books I ever read in high school. I’d never thought about the death penalty then, as a teenager, and Grisham really made me start pondering it. Decades later, my inner jury is still not settled: I appreciate both libertarian and Catholic arguments against it, but I also have a pretty firm conviction that human predators ought to be addressed accordingly. One thing that leapt out to me immediately is a historical error: Sam claims to be a fourth-generation Klansmen, which is nonsense on stilts juggling three balls of flaming lunacy given that the first Klan was gone by the 1870s, the second Klan didn’t begin until the 1920s where it was formally “revived”, and after it imploded groups calling themselves the KKK didn’t revive until the 1950s or so. There are a few other quirks (historical, gun mechanics, the most ludicrous attempt at portraying a ‘klan rally’ since O Brother Where Art Thou), but that’s moseying into digression. As a moral drama, it still succeeds wonderfully: Adam having to learn who his grandfather was and wrestle between his desire to know Sam and his repugnance at Sam’s racial bitterness and bigotry – and the growing third factor, the very real premise that Sam wasn’t the man who planted the bomb. Rewatching this – I think this is only my second time? – made me appreciate the late Hackman’s acting chops all the more.
“Why would the FBI want to hide information from a case that’s thirty years old?” “You in Mississippi, now. The land of secrets.”
The Client, 1994. TOMMY LEE JONES! …also there’s a plot about a kid seeing something he shouldn’t have and being harassed by the state because the Mob was involved. All I remember is that Sarandon’s character is a fan of Led Zeppelin and that “indigent” means “poor”. Not sure when I watched this for the first time, but it was probably the early 2000s. The kid, Mark, becomes a pawn between the Mob and the State because he witnessed a lawyer with Mafia ties killing himself. The bad guys here are evil-league-of-evil evil, and I found myself wondering if they’re this bad in the book. (It’s been a long time since I read it.) On the bright side, there’s the aforementioned Tommy Lee Jones, and “Ruth” from Fried Green Tomatoes, otherwise known as Mary Louise Parker. Tig from Sons of Anarchy plays a minor mook here.
The Pelican Brief, 1993. This film had Julia Roberts, and that is the most I can say. The movie is basically a prolonged chase scene that was an enormous downgrade from the character-centric JG movies preceding it. This may be the first time a Denzel Washington movie has bored me to sleep multiple time. Stanley Tucci was also present, but he had hair and that was disturbing. My first Grisham movie that’s NOT a rewatch!
Deliverance, 1972. Burt Reynolds looks weird without his mustache. While I’ve watched the “Dueling Banjos” scene many a time (let’s ignore the fact that it involves one banjo and one geetar), I’ve never seen the movie. The night before Halloween, though, seemed appropriate for a ….murder-thriller set in some Appalachian backwoods? Anyway, a buncha soft-handed city boys decide to take a canoe trip down a river ‘for it’s dammed up and lost, and in their high-handed approach manage to annoy the locals who commence to murderin’ them, because what’s the difference between an insurance salesman and a Yankee at the end of the day, right? One interesting scene for me was the song played at the end of the Atlantans’ first day: while some of the lyrics are shared with the traditional song “Rye Whisky”, the tune is very different – much more melancholy – and the lyrics as a whole diverge. Features a disturbingly un-moostached Burt Reynolds and a sadly moostached Jon Voight. There’s a disturbing scene when Jon Voight was trying to take a young buck who was barely a button-head in velvet. Talk about disrespect for nature. (Deer season doesn’t start until bucks have developed their antlers more fully and have shed their velvet.) Anyway, this gets disturbing. I do appreciate the wailing cicadas, though it confused me as to the seasons when combined with a late spring/early summer buck. Another small appreciation is the power of the river, and its role in the movie. There’s an interesting overall theme in this movie on civilization and savagery….and on how quick our primal instincts overturn one for the other.
“You can’t judge people by the way they look, Chubby.”
“It’s true what you said, Lewis. There’s something in the woods and the water that we have lost in the city.” “We didn’t lose it. We sold it.”
E.T. Home! Home!
E.T., 1982. A small boy discovers a marooned alien in his back yard and befriends it…only to have to rescue it from G-men. This is very possibly the first non-cartoon movie I watched as a kid, around age five or six or so on VHS. I’ve watched it maybe once since, and I figured since it has a Halloween scene, why not watch it on Halloween? If Die Hard can be a Christmas movie, E.T. can be a Halloween movie! Watching this as an adult, I’m impressed by the practical effects and sound design: seeing E.T. get left behind and managing to understand its desperation and pain works. Some parts have….aged: Elliot’s brother wants to go to Halloween dressed as a terrorist, making me wonder what the stereotypical conception of a terrorist was back then. The arrival of the G.Men in hygiene suits is still intimidating, even if close up they look like astronauts doing Darth Vader breathing impressions.
Zero Day (2003). A Columbine-inspired found footage documentary, in which we witness two friends with violent fantasies collude and plan a school shooting. What makes Zero Day so utterly disturbing is the nature of the production itself, the “found footage” approach: the film is presented as a series of clips taken from consumer video recorders, some purposely filmed by the future shooters as a record for the future, some simply documenting their lives as-lived. We get a sense of the boys as people, with utterly normal social circles and lives, though they do have resentments toward certain parties at school. One such person is “Brad Huff”, a jerk jock whose house they pelt with rotten eggs after arriving at his home to find his SUV nowhere in sight. The found footage is eerily weird, with expect amounts of outtakes, muffed lines, and “teenagers mugging for the camera” that you’d expect. It avoids the poor widdle buwwied story completely: we see two teenagers with unhealthy interior lives and an uncanny awareness of how they’d be perceived afterwards ratcheting each other into a course of destruction, where they will escape a world and a school they hate by turning it into a bloody mess. Zero Day is far more unsettlingthan Elephant for its approach, though I will admit to being partial toward found footage.(See my affection for The Blair Witch Project, which continues to disappoint my film buddies.) The acting is uncanny across the board.
My political biography began during the War on Terror, when I developed strong feelings about foreign intervention and the military-police surveillance state. While reading Howard Zinn in my college years, I was astonished and delighted to learn of a US President standing up against corporate interests and thwarting their attempt to take over Hawaii in the name of the United States. Although his efforts were later rendered moot when another president bowed to imperialism, I still appreciated them. The man? Grover Cleveland. I’ve been wanting to read a proper biography of him for some time now, and when I stumbled on this in a used bookstore, I picked it up immediately. While it’s not quite what I was looking for – being more politically than biographically oriented – it did whet my appetite for reading more about the man.
The Last Jeffersonian introduces Cleveland as a man who was asked to step up to run for president in an hour when the Democratic party had lost its way. Castigated as the party of secession and rebellion, they’d been out of power for decades – but Cleveland, a man who had established a history for clean, fair governance both as a mayor and a governor, seemed to be the man to give them a fresh start. This introduction is important to the concept of the book, because the author is writing it in a day when the Republican party was rudderless as well: Obama had swept into power offering charisma and vision, and the best the GOP could offer was..er, Mitt Romney. Walters largely uses Cleveland’s legacy in office to critique other executives – chiefly Obama, given the looming election, but to lesser degrees the Roosevelts, McKinley, and FDR. Given that the book is not that large to begin with (~200 pages), this political sidequest may frustrate those looking for a pure biography.
When the book is focused on Cleveland, though, it’s quite interesting. Because it’s not a strict biography, Walters makes the choice to organize it by theme rather than chronology. There are chapters on Cleveland’s deportment, his domestic policy, his approach to finance and foreign policy, and so on. As mentioned, Cleveland had an interesting history as an executive: he began as the Mayor of Buffalo in 1881, graduated to Governor in the mid-1880s, and ended up President. His public slogan and private motto was that “A public office is a public trust”, and Walters argues that Cleveland lived up to this with zeal at each level. Coming from a family thick with preachers, Cleveland was a man convinced of the value of virtue, especially for those serving in public office. Because this is my first Cleveland biography, I have to take these claims with a grain of salt: these early chapters were nearly hagiographic. I was more interested in the chapters on monetary and foreign policy: here, facts largely tracked with what I knew, and I think Walters was successful in explaining the significance of the gold-vs-silver debates of the late 19th century in both public policy and the economy.
Walters describes Cleveland as Jeffersonian for good reason: he earned a reputation in both municipal and state politics for vetoing bills, whether to void unnecessary spending or prevent expansion of state power. This did not make him popular, especially when he denied a bill that would pay for seeds to assist farmers who had lost some of their stock: direct assistance was charity to be practiced by the people in themselves, not through the government. He appears to have largely honored the maxim, that government is best which governs least. There were exceptions, especially when it came to corporations: Cleveland was instrumental in creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the railroads, though the author notes the ICC quickly grew oppressive in its own right. Perhaps his finest moment, though, was trying to keep the Stars and Stripes free of the imperial stain and pushing back against the proposed annexation of Hawaii.
This was an interesting read: Walters is definitely writing for those strongly sympathetic of Jeffersonian ideals, and he draws on libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul in his analysis of monetary policy. That’s particularly relevant for this political period given that it was the “Ron Paul Revolution”: Paul was building a huge following at the time, and connecting to the anti-tax, anti-spending elements of the older Republican base. As we know, that’s not the way the political winds blew: instead of getting a Jeffersonian, we’ve gotten a Jacksonian.
I’d intended to post this list earlier in the week for the Top Ten Tuesday freebie, but couldn’t remember the name of the book I was using, Alabama Mortality Schedule (1850, Seventh Census of the United States). I stumbled on this years ago and was immediately mystified (and sometimes amused) by the listed causes of death. As you might expect, there are a lot of diseases that are now treatable, and a great many causes of death that were unique to a more rustic age — falling from horses, being crushed in a cotton gin, and “entangled in plow gears” (yikes!). Amid the whooping cough and drownings, though, there are some causes of death that are….unusual.
Old Live Oak Cemetery Selma, Alabama
(1)“St. Anthony’s Fire”. That sounds like an epic way to die, but it appears to be poisoning via wheat infected by fungi.
(2) “Milk Leg Fever“, which is the strangest way to describe a blood clot I can imagine.
(3) “Teething“. Teething? According to the University of Leeds, it was common in The Olden Days for people to attribute deaths by fever or such while a toddler was teething to the teething process itself. Oral health was serious back then: Red Gum, or gingivitis, is also listed as a cause of death. See? Flossing is important.
(4). “St. Vitus Dance“. A vernacular name for “Sydenham’s chorea”, an inflammatory response to strep. So named because its symptoms included bodily jerking, and people prayed for relief to St. Vitus, the patron saint of dancers. Must have been an old traditional name, since Alabama has never had a huge Catholic population.
(5) “Gunard Deply”. If you’ve ever done genealogical or historical research prior to the 19th century and dealt with handwritten sources, or typed transcriptions of handwritten source texts, you may appreciate the…er, creative variety of how names, etc were taken down by census takers and the like. “Diabeetus”, “New Monia”, and “Dysenterry” all appear in this book, for instance, indicating that Wilford Brimley may have been older than we knew. There’s no telling what Gunard Deply is, but ChatGPT guessed that it might’ve meant “General Debility”. If you think that’s too vague for an official Cause of Death, please know that this book also includes “Old Age”, “Complications”, and “Liquor” as causes.
“She hath done what she could.” The wife of one of Cahawba’s notorious drunkards. The New Cemetery, Old Cahawba Archaeological Park.
(6) “Dirt Eater”. It is a ….thing…that some southerners, black and white, eat white clay. I’ve even seen bags of white dirt being sold in gas stations. One journalist who investigated this described the taste as “fresh rain on a hot day”. Evidently some people have a taste for it, just as some people can’t eat cilantro because it tastes like soap. (I am not one of these people, thanks be to God.) Strikingly, this is not a one off, but appears every so often. It’s a bit sad to have an insult hurled at one’s corpse as the official cause of death.
(7) “Complications”. Yeah, we’ve all had that that kind of weekend. Also see “Intemperance”. I’d possibly add “Mortification”, which often follows intemperance and its complications, but evidently in the 19th century that referred to necrosis or gangrene. (Relatedly: “Gravel” referred not to being stoned to death, but to kidney stones and related issues.)
(8) “Gen’l Derangement”. I’m sure there’s a story behind this one, as with “Spinster”.
(9) “Worms”. I’m guessing we’re talking tapeworms and hookworms, not Tremors type worms. According to the University of Arkansas, parents who believed their children had intestinal worms sometimes accidentally poisoned them with snake oil products — not the only case of someone dying of the cure. One strange entry in the book, “corrosive sublimate”, proved to be mercury poisoning as a treatment for syphilis.
(10) “The King’s Evil”. Tuberculosis in the lymph nodes! Back then TB was referred to as “consumption”, a handy fact if you ever want to impress a Civil War reenactor.
Check out more strange deadly diseases over at CSI: Dixie’s “Graveyard of Old Diseases“! You can also check out mortality schedules for yourself over at Ancestry, and read about the background of their creation here.
While some of these names are amusing, and digging into what they meant proved to be both fun and stimulating, it was a stark reminder of how dangerous a place the 19th century frontier could be. There were sad stories I could glean from the data here, like an entire family who drowned together, or the constant spectre of infant mortality. Even so, there was humor to be found — from the absurd causes listed for some, to the census takers’ glimpses of humanity as they wrote in question marks behind listed causes they couldn’t understand.
But while I learned this early, it was much later that I learned something else, dimly and slowly, through my study of history, mythology and, well, people: that every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from. […]
The dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.
Cut loose in a post-modern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.
The quest for perfection is a quest for homogeneity and control, and it leads to the gulag and the guillotine, the death camp and the holy war. Even if we could agree on what perfection amounted to, we would none of us be equipped to build it.
Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer could. The majority of humanity is now living in megacities, cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it.
This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up—cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such ‘technics’, as Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition. The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.
Many people have simply forgotten what it feels like not to be pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen. Many people are not paying attention.
Rebellion is necessary, if we are to remain human at all.
Looked at this way, it’s not hard to see that progressive leftism and the Machine, far from being antagonistic, are a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, ‘superstition’ and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one. […] Today’s left is no threat to technique; on the contrary, it is its vanguard. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of ‘revolution’ would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here. Progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian ‘Red Tory’ philosopher George Grant once observed that ‘the directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor [Herbert] Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.’ These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.
The West is my home—but the West has also eaten my home. Should I stand up to save it from itself? How would that happen? What would I be fighting for?
The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to to the nihil of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth—and recognise it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice. This is easier written than practiced, of course. But I think it might be the way through.
The Machine exists to create dependency. It is essentially a mechanism of colonisation.
My point is not that women should get back into the kitchen: it is that we all should, and into the other rooms of the home too. Machine modernity prised the men away from the home first, as the Industrial Revolution broke their cottage industries and swept them into the factories and mines, where their brute strength could be useful to the Machine. Later the women, who had been mostly left to tend the home single-handedly, were subject to the same ‘liberation’, which was sold to them as a blow struck against inequality. Perhaps it was, but it was also a blow struck against the home, for both sexes.
Make an idol of your nation, and you will end up sacrificing human lives to it.
If people, place, prayer and the past are the ground upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easy option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the nations of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?
Religion in the West is effectively dead, and yet our inherent human sense of the sacred is not. In this reign of quantity, we are assured that there is nothing beyond this life, and therefore nothing that we should not try to bend into our preferred shape here and now. But at the same time, we cannot abolish our hunger for the transcendent. We are no longer interested in God, and yet God is still interested in us.
The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself.
This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag. A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbour rather than competition with everyone.
It was the pandemic—or rather, the response to it—that finally ripped up that contract for me. I had not prepared myself for enforced medication on pain of job loss, blatant media narrative control, scientists being censored for asking the wrong kind of scientific question, or ordinary members of the public being locked out of society while politicians and journalists called them conspiracy theorists and far-right agitators. I wasn’t prepared to see in my country a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. When I did see it, it shook me hard, and it changed me.
The momentum of a state is always towards the centre; always towards the agglomeration of more power. No ‘conspiracy theory’ is necessary for any of this to be true, and neither do the people running the state need to be evil or ill-intentioned. It is simply the logic of the thing. A state is like a vortex or a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence.
I don’t hate many things in this world—hate is an emotion I can’t sustain for long—but I hate screens, and I hate the digital anticulture that has made them so ubiquitous. I hate what that anticulture has done to my world and to me personally. When I see a small child placed in front of a tablet by a parent on a smartphone, I want to cry; either that or smash the things and then deliver a lecture. When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off. I won’t have a smartphone in the house. I despise what comes through them and takes control of us. Takes control of me, when I let it.
Today’s TTT is a Halloween freebie, and while that should make things easier, it doesn’t. I’m not much for Halloween: my family didn’t celebrate it as a kid, and while I’ve enjoyed quite a few costume parties in. So, I’m really leaning into thewhole freebie thing. But first, the tease:
The momentum of a state is always towards the centre; always towards the agglomeration of more power. No ‘conspiracy theory’ is necessary for any of this to be true, and neither do the people running the state need to be evil or ill-intentioned. It is simply the logic of the thing. A state is like a vortex or a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence. (Paul Kingsnorth, AGAINST THE MACHINE)
So, now to the freebie. I’m going to go with “Ten Books I’ve Been Looking At on Amazon”. I was going to do “Top Ten Strange Things People Died From in Colonial Alabama,” but the book I like to amuse tourists with is not where it should be. (Whenever I show people the library’s local history room, I like to point out some of the more interesting resources, as well as genealogical volumes with funny names like “IT’s MCCRAW, NOT MCGRAW!” )
(1) Ask Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vicesfor a Whole and Holy Life, Grace Hamman (2) Those were the Vaqueros, Arnold Rojas (3) Watch With Me: and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, Wendell Berry (4) Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, Nicola Gardini. Trans. Todd Portnowitz. (5) Rebel Cornbread and Yankee Coffee: Authentic Civil War Cooking and Camaraderie, Garry Fisher (6) Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It, Sohrab Amari (7) Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece, Robin Waterfield (8) Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (9) Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray (10) The Myth of the Great War, John Mosier
. . . The machine appeared In the distance, singing to itself Of money. Its song was the web They were caught in, men and women Together. The villages were as flies To be sucked empty. God secreted A tear. Enough, enough, He commanded, but the machine Looked at him and went on singing.
At some point during college, I tried to work out what an ideal human society might look like. This was back when I still strongly identified with the left, but my dreams were not of a world state and a carefully-managed economy. Instead, I imagined something on the order of a small town, one in which the shops were owned by locals, and surrounded by farms that were also locally owned and operated. This was a small-scale vision, a humane one, and it made me realize I might not be much of a leftist after all. The vision was in fact nostalgic, a look at a world that agri-industrialization and globalization have since destroyed. I found kindred spirits and dreams in Chesterton and Wendell Berry, and now, in Paul Kingsnorth but his Against the Machine goes deeper than dreams. Against the Machine is a critique of how we came to be here, speculation that we have become victims of our own devices, increasingly captive creatures in the hands of a lustful and hungry god – the Machine. Kingsnorth draws on an impressive variety of authors – Marx, Berry, Mumford, others whom I’ve never heard of but will assuredly be looking into.
Against the Machine is fundamentally a critique of what might be called modernity, but it’s a deeper and yet more personal critique than one might expect. Kingsnorth opens the title on that personal level describing his love of Nature even as a child and his yearning for a deeper relationship with it. Relationship is a fundamental part of this book: our relationship with the Earth, with our tools, and with our Creator. Although this is not a “religious” book in the sense that it’s written for an audience of believers on a topic that’s “within” religion, it is religious in the sense that Kingsnorth has an ‘enchanted’ view of the cosmos. It was a view that led him to be an early environmental activist, and then become despairing when he witnessed the take over of environmentalism by beancounters and other apologists for the global consumer-machine. His reaction upon arriving at Mount Athos – a Greek Orthodox island-mount monastery so strict that women are not allowed – turned from reverence to dismay when he witnessed the brothers constantly pulling out phones from their robes and staring at them. “Even here?”
What is the machine? It is something inescapable. It is the industrial-consumer-financial order that owns the entire planet, except for pockets of jungle or some caves in Afghanistan. Its material form is The Grid, the vast mesh of powerlines, data centers, and smothering blankets of oil-soaked tarmac that now cover so much of the globe – and the factories and financial centers and big box stores that urge ever more getting and spending. It’s a fusion of powers – financial, corporate, culture – that lusts for more power. This is not, however, just a critique of the effects of industrialism on society, or the unintended side effects of consumer capitalism on communities and human culture. Kingsnorth’s critique goes deeper than that, though, because fundamentally he sees our dilemma as a theological and spiritual problem: the modernist worldview is simply a return to the Serpent’s original promise to Eve in the Garden: ye shall be as gods. Indeed, Yuval Harari unselfconsciously titled his book on the promises of the future as Homo Deus. The Future, however, the dream of Progress, has no attraction for Paul Kingsnorth. Nor does nostalgia, strictly: he realizes that the moving finger has writ and cannot be pushed back to cancel a line. He emphasizes, though, that it is importance to realize what has happened to us so that we may best figure out how to respond.
At the beginning of the book, Kingsnorth addresses the collapse of transcendent order in the West, its replacement by the control-and-consume ethos, and the great challenge the Machine poses to human flourishing. We need rootedness and meaning, Kingsnorth argues, and modernity offers us nothing even as it directly attacks those sources of happiness. – indeed, often the opposite case is true. Human culture has been savaged by modernity in more ways than we can even begin to appreciate. Homes full of amateur musicians entertaining one another in the long hours have turned to boxes of disconnected people staring at their respective devices, their heads filled not of folklore and the songs of their nation but the latest commercial jingle and pop/rap dopamine dance. Notions of particularity and tradition are replaced by meaningless dreams of cosmopolis and globalism; our places and people mean nothing to us, and we leave them without a thought to chase mammon elsewhere. Breathes there the man so dead? Yes, by the multitudes.
There is so much to take in these four hundred pages that I doubt I can write a review that can do it justice. Kingsnorth writes at the beginning that he feels as though he’s been writing around this issue all his life, and that this is his best effort to see the problem in full. I greatly sympathize with Paul on this point, because the concerns he muses over here are those I’ve had since I have been an adult, from the moment I realized on a factory floor that a life working just for money, or worse getting money just to spend it on DVD sets and clothes, was not for me. Those criticisms developed philosophical and political layers as I moved to college, but Kingsnorth goes beyond. The conception of the Machine a something with a life of its own, with a desire to expand itself, to use us to achieve its ends, is darkly fascinating. And yet when one reads about AI scientists feeling some strange compulsion to make the Golem they are making bigger and better even though they don’t like what it’s doing now and they don’t even understand how it’s doing it, something in the mind itches, and I am reminded of Rod Dreher’s opening line in Living in Wonder: “The world is not what you think it is.”
I have been looking forward to this book for months, and I read it slow, both for the complexity of its ideas, the deliciousness of spending time with someone who had the same concerns as I but had found words to address it, and the means to begin resisting it in his own life. Some of its arguments, especially when they get more theological as King compares the Machine to the spirit of Antichrist, will a little much for strictly secular readers. There is a great deal written here, though, that has broad appeal. I could see my college self or my later early -young adult self devouring this title – but it was that same self who, despite being an agnostic, found inexplicable interest in the company of priests and preachers, because they remained more interested in the inner yearning of humanity than merely our material comfort. The Machine offers comfort and ease, but at the cost of all else that matters.
In short: book of the year, no question. I have over a hundred highlights of this on Kindle and will try to post a best-of tomorrow or Wednesday.
When I was a wee bairn, in the olden days when the Earth was new and dinosaurs roamed the land, I cut my teeth on reading Kathryn Tucker Windham’s collections of ghost stories. KTW, or “Kathryn” as Selmians still call her, was a journalist who loved story telling and oral history: she collected stories and shared them, and I have fond memories of attending festivals at Dallas County’s ghost town, Old Cahawba, and listening to her speak. Her most known books were the 13 ____________ Ghost and Jeffrey” series: I read every single one my library had multiple times. I thought it might be fun to revisit it. This won’t be a formal review, as such, but more of an exercise in reflection.
I should begin by explaining who “Jeffrey” is: Jeffrey was KTW’s mascot, of a sort, a ghost she insisted lived in her home in Selma. This book opens with her experiences with Jeffrey, and I suspect (but cannot remember enough to be certain) that the other books also include a Jeffrey story before she shares ghost stories of Georgia, Mississippi, and so on. She was good enough at promoting him that there’s still a little ‘marker’ of him on our main downdown street:
The parking lot that replaced the Pollard building in 1966, because why not tear down a beautiful building to make room for cars?
What follows after the Jeffrey story are thirteen different ghost stories taken from across Alabama, two from my home account of Alabama. They’re all 19th century stories, which is not something I paid attention to as a kid but seemed very salient reading as an adult. One of my coworkers once asked me why I thought ghost stories always seemed to gravitate toward the mid-19th century, and I speculated that it had something to do with the rise of Spiritualism, and that naturally people would have looked to the generation before theirs that was now “lost”. That’s just speculation, of course, and if I wanted to really get out into the weeds I might add that it had something to do with the horrors of the Civil War — the South was littered in death and ruin, and telling stories about spectres from the past kept their memory alive, somehow, or at least provided some way to muse or grapple with the past. Indeed, the War is very much part of most of these stories: a young soldier and his intended taking a walk and being harrassed by spectral balls, a young woman throwing herself to her death after seeing a rider coming with news that her own beau had fallen in battle, and so on. The Selma story included is here one connected to the War, concerning a Mr. John Parkman who made some bad investment choices with Federal money and found himself imprisoned when the market soured. He then escaped, and was somehow killed: I say ‘somehow’ because the manner of his death varies on the manner of his escape:there are various stories as to how he was killed. At any rate, some three years later the servants at his house in Selma (now known as Sturdivant Hall, an exquisite example of antebellum architecture that is now an art museum) began reporting that ol’ Mr. John was….back. I do not know why it took him three years to mosey ten miles from Cahawba to Selma, nor why he seems to refer the rear corner of the estate where a fig orchard used to be, but that is how the story goes.
While most of the stories involve visual ghostly presences, there are other stories where the spirits make themselves known by sound: one young woman evidently enjoys tip-toeing down the hall and then playing popular music of the 1860s, though she’s shy and stops if someone tries to sneak into the room. As a kid, the creepiest of these was “The Hole That Never Stays Filled”, the site of a hanging where the resentful ghost continues to maintain the pit that did him in. I was raised in a church where you weren’t supposed to believe in ghosts, so I used to dismiss most of these stories as just people’s imagination. A hole that wouldn’t stay filled, though? Kid-me was not creative enough to think that perhaps locals kept an eye on the place and maintained the hole just to attract tourists. At any rate, the Chattahoochee River destroyed the hole, and that vacuous object we call ‘progress’ has also destroyed the site of Montgomery’s “Red Lady” at Huntington College. Presumably not longer being able to annoy popular society ladies who snubbed her in real life, she now wanders the nearby streets. I can recommend that she haunt the Capri theater nearby: it’s not too far a float, and it’s sufficiently old that new stories can pop out to explain her way.
I am not one to believe in ghosts, but the older I get the more I appreciate folk-memory and folk stories and the cultural continuity they are part of. That is a hope that seems more and more forlorn in these days of liquid modernity, though. Even so, I may read a couple more of these volumes before All Hallows’ Eve, just to re familiarize myself with some of “Kathryn’s” work. Part of my inspiration for reading this was attending the 42nd annual Tale-Telling Festival in downtown Selma last week, a festival Kathryn started. Originally, professional storytellers would share their favorites with the crowd, and then at the “Swapping Grounds”, Selmians who had a gift for telling a yarn would have their own time at bat. These days it’s more about the professional, but folk elements are still included through music — and this last year, a local who likes to sit in the downtown diner and talk loudly to anyone in earshot was invited to speak a little bit.
The Downtown Declaimer and Charlie “Tin Man” Lucas
Adam Booth, the star comedian; Mr Charlie; and a musician whose band name I didn’t quite get
Adam from a prior year’s performance, with Kathryn looking on from the portrait
The….Greater Dallas County Bluegrass and BBQ Research Group, I think this band called themselves. As a testament to living in small towns, I know almost everyone in this band, and half of them from my church.
Reading Freely 