The Debutante is Jon Ronson’s investigation into the rumors and contradictions surrounding Carol Howe, a young woman who became interested in white nationalism and associated with various and sundry neo-Nazi types until she was raped by Dennis Mahon (later imprisoned for an Arizona bombing) and became a state informant against them. Her origin is especially curious because while she was a child of privilege, she was an adopted child of privilege — and one of her schoolmates interviewed here suggested that Carol embracing racial nationalism was her way of establishing an identity for herself. Carol is chiefly of interest because she claimed that Timothy McVeigh was directly connected to a community of separatists and racists called Elohim City, and that he and others were planning on attacking federal buildings. Ron’s investigation includes interviews with those who knew Howe, and those connection to Elohim City — including the alleged “John Doe #2”, Andreas Strassmeier, who was ejected from Elohim City during the McVeigh investigation. (The Strassmeier interview is especially interesting because he wants to know if Ronson buys the ‘official story’, and speculates himself as to who John Doe 2 might be — taking Ronson by surprise!) The audible version appears to have been adapted from Ronson’s BBC series, so there are a lot of clips of repeated audio — but we do get to hear his interviews with the people themselves, which is considerably more interesting than listening to him do both sides back and forth, especially given that he’s not the most pleasant narrator to listen to. (He’s a British David Sedaris — fine in short doses but grating for longer periods.) Ultimately, Ronson is unconvinced that the bombing involved anything more than McVeigh, though it appears McVeigh had attempted to approach Elohim City. It’s 4 stars for the content in general, and 3.5 for the audio. As much as I loved hearing the actual interviews, the repeated clips detract a bit. I do appreciate Ronson’s determination not to get carried away by anyone’s narratives — especially given Howe appears to have been a compulsive story-spinner — and stick to what is most plausible given confirmed facts. (At least, for this issue. He still trots out the January 6 ‘insurrection’ as though policemen weren’t actively escorting the supposed insurgents.) For my money, having read a biography of McVeigh, I’m content believing that his army background gave him more than sufficient technical knowledge to build the truck bomb. The book ends on a marginally happy note, as Ronson learns that Carol has changed her name and is attempting to recover from the mental poisons she fed herself for long.
When Kristin Kimball left her cozy confines in the big city to interview a passionate young farmer in the sticks, she had no idea her life was about to change. Mark lived in a simple trailer and farmed someone else’s land, but he produced such exquisite vegetables that people came from miles around to buy food from him. His dream was his own farm, where he could go off-grid completely and develop something like a CSA on steroids – providing for the entirety of its members’ food needs. No sooner had Kristin showed up for the interview than Mark put her to work hoing broccoli. The two found themselves drawn together despite their differences in lifestyles, and before she knew it Kristin had left her apartment behind and pooled her money with Mark’s to engage in an enterprise of bringing a dormant farm back to life – learning not merely intensive gardening along the way, but animal husbandry and other diverse skills that farms demand at the most unexpected times. Most challenging, though, she and Mark both have to learn to be partners — pulling together as a team, much like their horses Sam and Silver.
The Dirty Life is, like the soil Mark and Kristin lived on, rich in value. On a superficial level, it’s the story of their first year trying to revive Essex Farm, which would have been challenging enough for anyone without the added burden of their ambition: they wanted to be able to provide a complete diet for not only them but dozens of others, which meant developing (quickly) the knowledge, stock and fields, and material infrastructure required to provide a diverse diet. They couldn’t just buy a few hundred head of cattle and send them off to be butchered: no, they were creating a wide range of animal products, and often developing the knowledge to do so on the fly. Mark was a master gardener, but neither he nor Kristin knew the first thing about animal husbandry — and now they were not only raising cows and swine, but driving horses. As Kristin quickly learned, knowing how to ride a horse is much different than working a team across the land.
All of this would be fascinating in itself, assuming you are interested in agriculture, homesteading, animals, local food, etc. But the soil keeps gets deeper, as Kristin continues to adapt to life on the farm. Previously, she’d lived a very comfortable existence as a consumer-creature, her life filled with ease, comfort, and pretty things. As a partner in Essex Farms, she worked long hours, abusing both her clothes and her body, and in addition to the daily demanding chores, she and Mark also had to navigate emergency after emergency. Despite frequently being sore and always being covered in dirt, blood, and…other stuff, though, the former comfy city girl found intense pleasure and meaning in this life of work, in the physical exertion itself and the satisfaction of seeing her labor immediately bear fruit. She and Mark also were not alone: from the moment they arrived in Essex, Mark and Kristin were welcomed into the local community, who were so glad to see new arrivals that they offered tools, advice, and labor freely. Like the Mendes in Better Off, and like the agricultural community portrayed in Wendell Berry’s Port William series, the Kimballs lived as members – most intimately with one another, and of their farm, but of the outside community. They saw and worked with the members of their village every day, and when they had developed to the point that offering shares was possible, the people of Essex were the first to buy in. By the first few years, they were feeding hundreds.
I knew I’d love this from the word go, and was not disappointed. Mark and Kristin recreated for themselves a life lost to most humans, a life not only wed to the land, within the rhythms of nature, but a life in full. Gone were Kristin’s days of sitting in front of a computer, using only her mind. The farm demanded mind and body — sometimes brute labor, but more often than not strength married to experience, strength guided by intelligence. They had to solve problems never anticipated, draw on inner reserves they never dreamt existed. Reclaiming the farm from neglect and abuse required every part of Mark and Kristin’s being: their muscles, their minds, and their spirits. They lived integrated lives, putting their whole selves to use but also integrating themselves into the community of Essex, where they became a vital part of its now-growing web of human connections. The more we descend into the brave new world of the 21st century, the more we drift from reality into some omnipresent digital construct, where we drift through as disembodied avatars with no more substance than a hologram cast in the sky, the more valuable perspectives like Kristin’s are. We hunger for substance and meaning, and she found both.
“Raw milk from a Jersey cow is a totally different substance from what I’d thought of as milk. If you do not own a cow or know someone who owns a cow, I must caution you to never try raw milk straight from the teat of a Jersey cow, because it would be cruel to taste it once and not have access to it again.”
“‘I don’t want to tell you what to do,’ Shep began. This, I’d found, was a very common statement in North Country. You’re not considered rude if you don’t return phone calls, or if you get drunk while working, or fail to show up as promised, but telling someone how to dosomething is bad form and requires a disclaimer.”
“As I patched the barn with scrap lumber, pig-tight but ugly, I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I’d come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world – -the trades — was the place you ended up if you weren’t bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than the person who writes ad copy or interprets the law?”
“This land had been farmed since before the American Revolution. The stock, the crops, the fence lines, the buildings, and the farmers had come and gone, passing over the fields like shadows in the course of the day. You can’t truly own a farm, no matter what the deed says. It has a life of its own. You can love it beyond measure, and you are responsible for it, but at most you’re married to it.”
Related: Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. Eric Bende. The story of a newlywed couple who join a ‘minimite’ community. Literally anything by Wendell Berry, whose essays cover a lot of what Mark was concerned about, and who I would not be surprised to learn was an influence. The use of animals to work the farm instead of tractors, for instance. Ditto Joel Salatin, who like Mark and Kristin took it on himself to reclaim a homestead that was not only abandoned, but largely ruined by machine-farming.
Today’s “Top Ten Tuesday” is ‘bookish wishes’, or books we’d like to own. But first! Teases!
Teaser Tuesday, Or: A Buncha Quotes from Level Up That I liked
“Hell no. I don’t want to make it weird. She’s just out of a serious relationship. I’m just going to work on our friendship.” “Congrats mate, you’ve maxed out your friend zone skill.”
I’m holding a handful of teeth. I’m not sure how many of them are mine.
I can do this. I just have to say something nice about her, a compliment, anything to break the ice. Anything at all. “You have a face!”
“You seem to be getting the hang of the combat, but you shouldn’t have let them punch you in the face so many times.” “Thank you sensei, I shall heed your words of wisdom passed down from the ancient times.”
The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. A bit like Humans of New York, I think, but all belles and no beaus.
The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, Louis Theroux. If you can’t tell from my recent reading, I am definitely in a Mood for this sort of thing.
The Life We’re Looking for: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.
Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias
Digital Madness: How Social Media is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis
The Well-Tuned Brain: The Remedy for a Manic Society
Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of natural History, Local History, and Folklore. Planning to buy this as a birthday gift for a dear friend of mine, but will (naturally) have to read it first to ensure it’s as good as the title promises.
Angels, Barbarians, and Nincompoops is a wonderful romp through a few score words in the English language. Esolen has always impressed me as a man deep in word & song, saturated by the beauty of language — and here he is like a boy, playing with his favorite words and showing them off to the reader, with too much delight to keep to himself. Given how serious Esolen’s other works tend to be, I enjoyed this both for its content, and to experience Esolen’s joy at his subject. It’s a lovely mix of etymology, history, and a dash of Esolen’s characteristic cutting wisdom. . Originally purchased for Read of England. Some quotes!
The bureaucrats who sat heavy upon the soul of Scripture, lying like lead within its bosom as they translated it from Greek into the Unglish of a certain version I dislike intensely and will not name, turned up their noses at angel or herald. They say that a messenger came from God to Abraham on Mount Moriah, which in our tongue makes him sound like a telegraph boy from Western Union. “God to Abraham: stop. Hands off the boy. Stop. Faithfulness duly noted. Stop.” Lovers of beauty in language and liturgy to such translators: STOP!
But that wasn’t the old word for fruit in general. That old word was aeppel: Modern English apple. That’s the origin, there, of the idea in English that Adam and Eve ate an apple. What they ate was a fruit. In medieval iconography, it’s usually a pear. It could have been a peach or a pear or a pomegranate—or an apple.
We also would never have had the scornful name for the late nineteenth century in America: The Gilded Age. That was when writers like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells suggested that the virtues of the newly rich industrialists were like gilt on wood or plaster: glittery and thinner than paper. If that was the Gilded Age, what is ours? We might hire for the job a sick cousin of gold and gild: The Jaundiced Age, yellow with the bile of a dying liver.
The hat gives us a clue that the French word is the same as the Italian persica, peach (cf. German Pfirsich). The word literally means the Persian thing. The peach wasn’t native to western Europe, but was brought back west by Roman traders with the Persians, who lived in modern day Iran.
My favorite related word, though, is idiolect. No, that is not the special speech of politicians. That is denoted by the technical term gibberish. Nor is it the language of bureaucrats, educationists, and people who parrot their pronouncements: that is jargon, argot, patois. It is not the language of a reasonably well-defined subgroup, like the people who live on the Orkney Islands: theirs is a dialect. Nor the words and sayings and linguistic constructions of people who share a social class (patois), or a line of work (argot, jargon). An idiolect is a form of the language peculiar to one person alone. He goes beyond the idiom of his neighbors, and says things that only he says, or that only he says in the way that he says them.
The point is that human freedom and flourishing depend not upon our having choices, but upon our having the inner freedom—a liberating virtue, hard-won—to make right choices. The wrong choices enslave. It may look like liberty to choose among one of the dishes above, but it’s a liberty to choose which stuff is going to make your gorge rise up. It may look like liberty to have your choice among fifty ways to descend lower than a beast, but that’s a liberty to choose the color of your manacles and fetters. They may come in all the colors of the rainbow, but they are still going to chain you to the post.
Man is always more than man: we must aspire to the transcendent, or we die inside.
This is…sort of a sequel to Them, in that Ronson builds off his relationship with Alex Jones (established before Jones was famous, when both were curious about the Bohemian Grove meetings and infiltrated a ceremony together) to react to the fact Jones has the ear of the man who might (and would) become el presidente. Entertaining enough, but a lot of it copies Them directly, something I only noticed because I read these back to back. It’s more of a long essay than a book, at fifty pages.
Lastly, Inside the Klavern. This is an odd book, consisting almost entirely of the minutes of an Oregon chapter of the Klan in the 1920s, so it’s chiefly of interest to those with a serious, possibly academic, interest in the ’20s Klan. As far as content goes, this is exactly as exciting as you’d expect minutes of a civic organization to be. There’s much chatter about paying dues, hosting visitors, etc. The casual reader may not realize that the 1920s Klan was much different from the 1870s Klan (which existed to attack carpetbaggers and freedmen) and the 1950s Klan (which existed to intimidate blacks and whites organizing for integration, civil rights, etc). These minutes indicate how different the 1920s Klan really was — racist, yes but more broadly xenophobic and reactionary, incorporating some moral crusades of the day like Prohibition and promoting “100% Americanism”. This was in large part a reaction to the enormous amount of immigration from Europe, which brought with it different religions (greater numbers of Catholics and Jews, for instance, who were arguably more of interest to the ’20s Klan than blacks) and political mores. The Klan of this time saw themselves as just like any other fraternal organization of the time — supporting sick members, helping each other find work supporting one another’s businesses, frequently socializing and the like — but who were ‘woke’ to the cultural and racial problems at hand. They were not wholly ideological, however: some of the later minutes here delve into a local water problem at great length, as though we were reading the minutes of the Rotary club. The Oregon chapter here doesn’t appear to engage in any violence, though the minutes do allude to people being intimidated, including their own members — for crimes like neglecting their families, drinking, or shopping in the businesses of ‘aliens’. Although a lay reader would profit better from a normal history of the ’20s Klan (I can tentatively recommend Behind the Mask of Chivalry, though it’s problematic in parts) this does offer a look into proceedings, rituals, and the like.
Next up….a Jon Ronson audiobook in which a debuntate turned swatiska-wearing pinup girl of a white supremacy movement claims Timothy McVeigh was just a mule for the real architect of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Personally, dear reader, if I were infiltrating Bohemian Grove, where the American aristocracy gathers to sacrifice children to Moloch and dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, I wouldn’t take Alex Jones along with me. He’s entertaining company, sure, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a quiet mode – and when one is trying to violate the meeting of people with private armies and access to dungeons and the like, one wants to go unnoticed. Jon Ronson, however, had better ideas – and considering that he’d been outed as a Jew in front of both jihadists and Klansmen, I suppose he figured he could survive anything. Them is an entertaining collection of Jon Ronson’s adventures in this vein, as he attempts to learn why so many people believe in a secret cabal that runs everything, whether they be lizards or Jews.
Unlike Will Storr’s The Unpersuadables, Them was not a project undertaken to understand why people believe unusual things; instead, it’s one collection of many of Ronson’s articles about people on the fringe. As such, we’re not diving deeply into how people’s beliefs originate, but rather spending time with them through Ronson and marveling at the weird places the human mind can take itself. Easily the strangest group he spends time with is David Icke’s circle, who believe the world to be dominated by shape-shifting lizards whose numbers include most prominent politicians and celebrities. Icke gives a recap of how he came to be aware of the lizard people, but it’s very cursory and has some….story-telling gaps, shall we say. Many of the chapters are linked by Ronson’s attemps to understand what the Bilderberg group is, and he goes as far as Portugal to attempt to learn about that year’s conference there. He is approached, confronted, and followed for mile after mile, pushing him into thinking that for an organization of perfectly respectable businesspeople talking about business and philanthrophy, they’re awfully sinister. By far the most entertaining chapters were Ronson’s visit to the new head of one Klan organization, in which we learn of Thomas Robb’s approach to leadership, with principles drawn from self-help books and psychological profile – followed by Ronson’s infilitration of Bohemian Grove, accompanied by Alex Jones. The idea of Jones wearing preppy clothing and trying to pass himself off as an IT venture capitalist is hysterical – made all the better by his sinking into wide-eyed paranoia when Ronson and he witnessed (among other things) the bizarre Cremation of Care ceremony. (Jones filmed this during their joint incursion, and used it as part of an early ‘documentary’ which effectively launched his career. So, if you hate Alex Jones, you can thank Jon Ronson!) Inspite of its weirdness, Ronson viewed the Bohemian Grove meetup as something kin more to a college kegger given its copious drinking and drag/Elvis costume contests. Some of the stories were more miscellaneous: the opening chapter among jihadists (pre 9/11) was amusing enough, but his travel to Africa with an Irish politician-turned-preacher & militia founder appeared out of place.
On the whole, Them made for entertaining reading, but there’s little insight here, and I wasn’t impressed with the background Ronson did, if any. He asserts that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City because it was an office of the New World Order, but I’ve never encountered that in anything I’ve read on McVeigh. McVeigh chose the Murrah building because it held offices for both the FBI and ATF, both of which he had an especial hatred for owing to their murder of Vickie Weaver and the men, women, and children of Branch David in Waco. The book is not devoid of serious implications, though: Ronson quickly realizes how quick the media is to grab onto a narrative and marry it, facts not withstanding. He himself is repeatedly described by the media as a conspiracy theorist despite being an outside observer, and he is shocked to discover that the “fortress” that Randy Weaver “fled” to was, in fact, a simple wooden cabin that was his and his family’s house. Weaver didn’t “flee” anywhere, he simply didn’t leave his home to show up in court.
Quibbles and occasional superficiality aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I’ll admit to having a soft spot for people with eccentric ideas, provided they’re not in my face ranting. Finding their blog or listening to them talk to someone else is quite sufficient. It helps, of course, that as someone with a strong libertarian bent, I’m considered ‘fringe’ myself — an object of dismay to progs and conservatives alike. (Not to mention: when you’re an anti-state type, you run into other anti-government types, and some of them are a little nuts. I’m sure some readers of this blog often wonder if I’m not a little nuts.) I think Ronson was generally fair — never mocking his subjects, and undoubtedly courageous. I plan on looking into more of his works, though judging by reviews he’s gotten more partisan and less curious over the years. His book on psychopaths looks particularly winsome….
I’ve gotta hand it to Dante, at least the character Dante. I though I’d fallen hard for a woman, but against him there is no parallel. Even Menelaus, who led a fleet to Troy to reclaim Helen, must bow before Dante’s fixation on Beatrice — for in Paradise, we follow our intrepid narrator who has been into the innermost bowels of Hell, and strenuously climbed the heights of Mount Purgatory, now rising through the various spheres of heaven and meeting all manner of sainted ones, from medieval figures to the father of humanity himself. The higher he rises the more he witnesses, including the Earth itself surrounded by the celestial spheres and layer upon layer of transcendant joy, of beauty that overwhelms the soul (set to the music of the Tannhauser Overture, surely) — and yet Dante again and again is enraptured by his fair Beatrice, whose rescuing presence in the dark wood started this comedy divine. All the glory of creation is before him, and yet he can only marvel how it makes her face all the more beautiful, so much so that she rebukes him gently — “There is more to paradise than my eyes!”. (She finally departs towards the end so he can focus on contemplating the mysteries of the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.) Paradise marks the end of the Divine Comedy, and it’s arguably the hardest for contemporary readers to tackle because it’s so overwhelmed by medieval cosmology, very much unlike our own. The Inferno and Mount Purgatory followed relatable geographies, but the heavenly realm of the medieval world almost unimaginable to we impoverished post-Copernicans, living as we do on a bit of wet rock doing circles around a larger bit of exploding gas. When Dante can pry his eyes away from his beloved, he’s engaging in theological discourse with those above — asking Adam about his sin, being grilled on the virtues by Saints Peter and James — but the author-Dante’s temporal concerns are still very much present, as we witness rebukes of the warring Italian factions who are spilling blood, or of the increasingly corrupt Dominican and Benedictine orders — the last scolding delivered by St. Benedict himself. There’s noticably more rhyming here, presumably because we have moved from the chaos of hell into the perfect harmony of heaven. As usual, Esolen’s in-text notes and notes are superb. I think it’s high time to read C.S. Lewis’ Discarded Image to better understand medieval cosmology.
Botanists tell us that the blossom is an evolution of the leaf–but they cannot say just why that particular bud should take from the same air and sunshine a fairer substance, a deeper color, a more permanent existence, and become something at which each passerby pauses, and goes on his way happier for the sight. Why on the sturdy stem of farmers and merchants should one girl blossom into a story-teller in pencil and in words?
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
William Shakespeare’s works, not yet ‘kidnapped’ by polite society into the realm of ‘higher culture’, were popular and well known among working-class audiences. […] Many saloongoers acquainted with Shakespearean verse were fond of parodies, such as Hamlet’s lamenting ‘the slings and dregs of outrageous whisky’, or telling Ophelia, “Get thee to a brewery!. Another example spoofed As You Like It:
‘All the world’s a bar, and all the men and women merely drinkers They have their hiccups and their staggerings..
Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in Workingmen’s Saloons
Men’s thinking on this issue seems to have involved an interesting mixture of solicitude and defiance. On the one hand, decent women should be protected from the rough world of men; on the other, the rough world of men should be protected from decent women. In the saloon, according to Hoke, ‘One ceased to be a man among women. One breasted the bar, downed a drink, and became a man among men.’ To allow women into this workingman’s world would not only cramp its style, but defeat its purpose as well.
In the large cities of Victorian America, well-heeled men of means could often be found in gentlemen’s clubs, private associations in which important matters of industry, business, and politics could be discussed in refined settings over gourmet meals with worthy company. The working man had his answer to that, though: the saloon. Long before bars became hookup locales where young people practice seduction over loud music and sickly-sweet mixed drinks, they were places where men could close the day with a pint, a song, and some uproarious stories – but more importantly, they were places where these men could be among their fellows, imbibing not merely in drinks but in comradeship. In Faces along the Bar, Madelon Power dives into the markedly different saloon culture of the 19th century, offering a sociology not of drinking but of how saloons were effectively workingmen’s clubs – something interesting in itself, but all the more because prior studies on the working class tend to focus on their labor, and not their leisure. Faces draws heavily from period accounts, from nonfiction memoirs like Jack London’s to fictional renderings of bar life in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to offer both an engaging social history and more serious analysis of what the saloon meant.
One of this book’s included photos demonstrates well how common saloons were in the working quarters of cities, with a dozen around one block along. Their commonness owed not just to the density of city populations, but to their diversity: given bars had affiliations with certain ethnic groups, occupations, or political leanings. Some saloons were strictly for particular unions, for instance, and ethnic divisions could be fine-grained indeed: a given saloon might not be just for Italian men, but for men from a particular part of Sicily. These ethnic bars were especially valuable in helping newcomers find jobs and places to live, as the bartender tended to collect, digest, and dispense useful information. Saloons were not merely places to drink: they served lunches that were free with a nickle beer, and these lunches were often better fare than could be found in restaurants, being subsidized by breweries who supported the expansion of saloons that they could then be the sole suppliers of booze to. Saloons were also primary source of recreation, from singing to boxing – and proper boxing, not just drunken bar brawls. Saloons were also a vital part of political organization, continuing an American tradition from the colonial days – one of the many reasons they attracted nativist attack, and one reason saloons were generally less common in the South than elsewhere. Despite the fact that many saloons were dominated by one group or another, saloons in general still aided in the American melting pot: Jewish barmen might hire assistant bartenders of another nationality to expand their clientele, and the free lunches and music offerings introduced ethnic groups to one another’s offerings. Black food & music made significant inroads in this fashion.
These free lunches were one of the few occasions in which women were permitted to invade the masculine space of the bar, which was a place above all where a man could be with his equals – no bosses, no wives. Kids could come in to sell newspapers or to get a pitcher filled with beer for the house, but the saloon was a place for men alone – and older boys coveted their future place there, playing make-believe barmen at home and being inculcated into the traditions and mores of masculinity once they were finally of age. The spittoons and urinal trenches testified to the saloon being a place for total ease and male solidarity. Men here groused and complained, entertained one another, shared information, or just enjoyed one another’s company . They developed elaborate drinking rituals in which they bought drinks for the fellas they were clubbing with, and received drinks in turn. Buying a drink on one’s own nickel and then leaving wasn’t just odd, it was positively antisocial. The men who claimed a bar and met there regularly had a sense of ownership in it, and when the day arrived that the bartender recognized them as a trustworthy regular who could maintain an open tab, it was a proud one.
Ultimately, Powers writes, though the saloon culture was overtly destroyed by the forces of the Anti-Saloon and temperance leagues – Klansmen, antagonistic wives, etc — in truth the saloons were undermining themselves by their own success. The closeknit communities they were fostering inside the bar often developed into organizations outside the bar: the early 20th century abounded with civics groups and fraternal organizations that built on the bonds developed from pubs, just like a group of men who ‘clubbed’ their books together in a Philadelphia tavern gave rise to American public libraries. The squelching of bar culture during the dark days of Prohibition meant that these organizations supplanted saloons entirely: they became, as the 20th century wore on, merely a place to drink and talk, not nuclei of community.
I thoroughly enjoyed this work, given my interests in social history of the late 19th and early 20th century, the importance of Place and community, and male society in general. I was a little suspect of this book from the start, given its female authorship, but Madelon Powers was more interested in learning about her subjects than judging them, and she appears genuinely fascinated by the rich saloon culture that was such a driving force in the late 19th century. They were genuine third places, but arguably even more than.
John Grisham is the author of scores of novels of varying quality and two collections of short stories, if memory serves. Sparring Partners is a ‘novelty’, in that it collects three novellas, ranging in time from the 1980s to the ‘present’, or at least some point when texting from cellphones is a possibility. As a collection, it’s OK — enjoyable enough reading if one needs a distraction, a bit like a sitcom. Two of the novellas are legal dramas, and the other is more of a human-interest story set on Death Row that allows Grisham to scratch his ever-present itch at sneering at the law & and order culture of the South. The first story, “Homecoming”, is the most interesting but it cheats by being set in Clanton, MS, using the reader’s affection for previously established characters (and they’re all here: Jake, Harry, Lucien, and even Reuben Atlee) get the drama off to a quick start. “Strawberry Moon”, the aforementioned Death Row story, features a man condemned to the Row as a minor for his partner in a home robbery turned double murder, one who only has one wish before he dies; and the third is about two brothers who are both stereotypes trapped in a law firm together by their imprisoned father’s contract skills, who realize a plan to relieve the old man of some of his hidden cash reserves — but things go sideways. None of the stories have real resolutions, just pregnant stopping points that indicate the way Grisham wants them to go, but can’t be bothered, and none of them appeared to involve any real effort. It’s not bad reading, it’s just not memorable or re-readable. Unfortunately, that’s a fairly common description of his stuff these days.
“There are worse things than wild beasts, natives, or outlaws.” I had my own thoughts as to what he was referring to. Nephilim, demons, even people like him. But I figured I’d heard him out this far. “Like what?” “Bureacracy.”
Cold as Hell introduced readers to James Crowley, an undead gunman who was killed trying to protect an innocent woman and her daughter Rosa from his gang’s boss. The White Throne saw fit to spare Crowley from Hell and put his talents to use dispatching the creatures of hell who torment and prey on humanity. Authors Rhett Bruno & Jaime Castle created a unique dark fantasy / western mix, integrating southwestern mythology into a story of a bounty hunter who targeted supernatural creatures. Vein Pursuits continues the story of Crowley, who — in the events of Cold as Hell — was reunited with the rescued girl from long ago, now a mysterious and beautiful woman who attracts both mortal men and the spawn of Satan alike. Rosa saw things in Cold as Hell that she cannot explain, and she’s driven to Crescent City (a thinly veiled New Orleans) for answers. Crowley is also dispatched to the City by the White Throne, and as they travel in the company of Bram Stoker (yes, really), they quickly realize that something dark is waiting for them in the big easy. Vein Pursuits is far more fantasy-dominant than Cold as Hell, but introduces some elements that make the overall story increasingly interesting. Frankly, the coolest part of this book is one I can’t say thing about for spoilers.
First things first: if you are a fan of Roger Clark from Red Dead Redemption II, who narrates this book and who was the actor for its main character Arthur Morgan (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crowley in terms of character & background), Vein Pursuits continues to deliver.. We open with Crowley/Arthur encountering reptilian beasts in the swamps outside of Crescent City, which can only be New Orleans given its size and the cryptids and personalities we meet there, including the Voodoo Queen, and Crowley’s contempt for the city mirror’s Arthur’s of “St. Denis”, Rockstar’s version of NOLA. At some point, I know, my brain is primed to see links where the authors did not intend them — but using the word “Chelonian” when a cult of that name has a presence in St. Denis? Crowley hunting vampires in New Orleans like Arthur can in one of the game’s many eerie secrets that players can stumble upon? The mention of Tesla, who has an obvious doppelganger in RDR2? Crowley urging someone to “Don’t look back”, just like Arthur does John? Okay, that may a bit of a reach. All the same, it’s extremely easy to see Arthur in this story, which gets extremely deep in fantasy-mythic lore. In Cold as Hell, the basic premise was that there was a gang of thieves hitting banks and using the powers of hell to aid them: here, Crowley is sent to Crescent City to hunt down The Betrayer, who we discover is the descendant of Cain and the father of all vampires — but things aren’t quite that simple. The enemies of the White Throne are not a uniform mass of coordinated villains: like mortal creatures, they fight in between themselves, and in the case of The Betrayer, have motives that go beyond merely resisting the Throne and being evil for the sake of evil. I’m really looking forward to what happens next in this series, because Crowley’s attachment for Rosa makes the Throne overtly hostile towards him, despite his being their servant, and by the end…..well, let’s just say things are never easy for a Black Badge. I’m definitely continuing in this series.
A light spoiler for those who want to know what the most interesting part of this is:
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