Tony Hillerman

Another life well-lived. And although Tony Hillerman will be remembered, quite rightly, for his mystery novels, the passage that sticks with me comes from his memoirs, describing an incident during his early post-war life as a reporter:

I was talking to a young Texas highway patrolman one morning outside the Stinnett Courthouse when his radio buzzed him. A double fatality on Highway 206 about 12 miles north. He roared away. I followed. A Packard sedan had collided head-on in about the center of the two-lane highway with some sort of pickup truck. The remains of the truck were scattered in the roadside wheat field. The sedan was still on the pavement, its front end back to the instrument panel missing. The body of the driver was in his seat, his head impaled on the steering post, blood, teeth and tissue splashed everywhere. The highway patrolman backed away from this, unable to control his nausea. I remember standing there untouched, guessing at the combined speeds, noticing how the wheel rim had gouged a rut in the concrete, collecting the details I'd need for my story, finally aware the patrolman, still pale and shaken, was looking at me as if I was something less than human. And all I could say to explain it was that it's not so bad when the dead are not your friends.

The shrinks had not yet invented post-combat trauma syndrome but I suppose that's the name for it — for the accumulation of baggage we sometimes talk about even now when what's left of Charley Company has its annual reunion. We mention the recurrence of old nightmares, of how long it took us to get rid of chronic moments of “morning sickness,” but we hardly ever discuss this incurable numbness. A deep, deep burn costs one the feeling in a fingertip. Perhaps seeing too much ghastly casual death does it to a nerve somewhere behind the forehead bone.

Links: here I muse over one of Hillerman's Jim Chee novels. Here I report back on his memoirs, which, though memorable, desperately needed an attentive copy editor.

A Life Well-Lived

After the last post I received inquiries into my father in law's state. He passed away this morning in a moment that, by the nurse's description, sounds as if it was quite peaceful.

Thank you all for your comments, thoughts and prayers. It seems fitting I link back to this post in which I contrasted his life with Hugh Hefner's, and wondered whose life was richer.

Swordfishtrombones (33 1/3 Series) by David Smay

We have become a driving household. Six weeks ago my father in law was taken to the hospital. He has since been moved to palliative care. Combine this with the usual school events and ringette games and the family schedule, such as it is, gets thrown seriously out of whack.

These events alter the reading habit too. A friend of mine once told me he'd read a bunch of John Irving novels while his wife underwent a series of critical operations. Now that he and his wife were on the other side of that health crisis, he couldn't remember anything about the novels, except that he had no trouble following their plots.

I'm not quite that preoccupied, but even so Continuum's 33 1/3 books are a very welcome alternative to choosing between "heavy lifting" novels and mysteries. They are wee things: roughly 4" X 5", 125 pages or so. They fit easily into jacket pockets, and look as if they were built to accompany the CDs of the albums they dissect and laud. They are written and published for people (guys, mostly) for whom the liner notes are never enough.

There are now over 60 of these books, and I had trouble deciding where to start. On the face of it my choice of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones by David Smay (A) was almost counterintuitive. I don't mind Waits in small doses -- on a mixed tape, or a "various artists" CD -- and I'm sure a concert would be an event worth the price and logistics of attending (certainly the movie was worth it). But it's rare that I bother myself with an entire album's worth of his material. Tom Waits fans are frequently Neil Young fans, and both performers start with the roadblock: Folks, you didn't come here to listen to something "pretty," so brace yourselves and let's go.

So why bother at all? I wasn't sure, but I dozily read through the first 25 pages in which Smay recounts Waits' preoccupation with the freakish, his determination to control his musical legacy, his stubborn streak and litigiousness when it comes to advertisers, and how advertisers would still give anything to get a little Waits' sound behind their corn chips and automobiles, and gradually I found myself compelled to accept Smay's own thesis: "Maybe Carnivale's creator never listened to Tom Waits -- doesn't matter. Because that vision that Tom created moves and breathes in the world now ... the Tom Waits Carnival is part of our common currency."

Damn. He's right!

I doubt I'll spring for another 60 titles, but I'm sure my 33 1/3 library is bound to get larger. If Continuum would like, I've even got a proposal for Jason & The Scorchers' Thunder & Fire (A), linking its underlying narrative to the preaching of Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes. I'm cheap, too: Will Write For Books.

Links: the 33 1/3 blog, my post on Jason & The Scorchers.

"Deeper" vs. "Urgent" Questions, vis-à-vis Milan Kundera

I heard an interview with one of the founders of London's School Of Life, a place that promises curious fun (home). She described the meals they hold, and among the questions "tabled" is: "When did you realize you were no longer a child?" My initial reaction to that question was, "I hope I am becoming more childlike (as opposed to childish) all the time!" After some consideration of Milan Kundera's past, however, I realized that there is at least one identifiable moment when I understood I was no longer a child: when I comprehended that most, if not all, of my favorite writers were anything but paragons of virtue.

I'm told the Cubans have a saying: "There are only two sorts of citizens: the innocent and the living." Certainly that is a motif that runs through the literature of dissident writers who witnessed Communism firsthand. This is not an uncommon motif in Western fiction either -- and properly so. Even so, revelations like these pose difficulties for readers who love their writers through their work.

Richard Byrne says, "The deeper question ... is how the reader should assess Kundera's approach to many of his pet themes -- memory, betrayal, and the defense of history against the violence done to it by our political leaders East and West." The Anabaptist Confessional side of me is surprised that Kundera's (and Grass's) "approach" wasn't more direct: begin with the worst of who you are, and proceed from there via concentric circles until you've worked out your salvation with fear and trembling, and the odd unexpected measure of grace. Of course, the fearful drunkard in me understands all too well why this approach is to be avoided at all costs.

Milan, Milan: God be with 'im, the poor sod. And perhaps while we're all pondering the deeper question we can address the more urgent one: how do we put a stop to our nation's policy and practice of torture?

"Except in accessories."

Two Ideas Whose Time Has Come

Palin/Wurzelbacher, 2012

Fudd Meridian

Oh, all right: I'll throw one in, too -- just for fun.

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

When I was in late adolescence I read several paperback versions of the Arthurian saga. Most of these were camp, usually with a slightly pornographic bent. They were all fun, but offered very little insight into what prompts humans to make wise or disastrous choices of far-reaching consequence. When I got to university I asked a friend who was immersing himself in Arthurian narratives to recommend a particular writer. He covered the gamut from T.H. White’s purely naturalistic approach (A) to some of the wilder “bibbety-bobbity-boo” magick-fests. “Mary Stewart strikes a balance between the two. Her Merlin is in the grip of some sort of supernatural impulse, but it isn’t magic wand stuff. I’d probably recommend her Merlin books over just about anyone else’s.”

Re-reading The Crystal Cave some twenty years later, I think my friend’s analysis was right on the money. Stewart introduces Merlin as a young, conniving bastard with an appetite for eavesdropping. He is a pitiable figure — picked upon, beaten and targeted for a courtyard assassination. But occasionally something seems to take hold of him and show him the true shape of things. He cannot summon this ability, but it visits him at crucial moments.

Already prone to manipulating people’s fear of him, he learns to exploit these moments with increasing confidence. By book’s end he is a cocky young man, gleefully assisting the newly crowned Uther in his midnight tryst with Lady Ygraine, an adulterous romp that will result in the birth of Arthur — and the New Beginning for England.

400-plus pages leading up to the conception of Arthur might seem like an indulgence in another writer’s hands, but Stewart ably demonstrates why her Arthurian account is still the first choice of geek (or any other) readers everywhere. Her pre-Arthurian England is mash-up of Christian and pagan sects vying to hold political sway over the country's itinerant warlords. Merlin is a skeptic of both religions, but has a shrewd sense of how the two collude. Above all he is a pragmatist with a sense of destiny, and he appeals to one or the other wherever they serve his purpose.

Someone once equated writing a novel to “juggling confetti” and in this regard Stewart has few peers. There are several strains of political intrigue running through these novels, and she has a clear sense of where they all lead, but only reveals what she has to in order to sustain reader interest. Again, this is meat and potatoes geek material, but she serves it up with considerable panache where someone like, say, Neal Stephenson sometimes struggles. In Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle an all too frequent narrative pattern was an unanticipated wallop of unexplained significance, followed by a buffering scene, followed by an episode that revealed what the wallop was all about. Stewart is a gentle massager of foreshadowing, giving the reader a sense of how and why a particular character is developing a moral blind-spot which will eventually be exploited to tragic effect. When surprises occur they do not materialize out of thin air, and thus have genuine emotional weight.

My 37-year-old copy of this book fell apart on my second reading, so I visited the nearest used bookstore and picked up replacements for all three titles. Is there a used bookstore that doesn’t have these books on hand? Go and find out. If you’re an Arthurian buff who hasn’t yet read Mary Stewart, you’ll thank me for introducing you to such cheap but enduring thrills.

(And of course there is always Amazon.)

Oh. Right.

The News today. I know finances are a bit tight right now, but wasn't that worth $300 million?