First, this is overwhelmingly sad. As a Christian and a Catholic, the death penalty is a national sin that taints all our souls.
But worse, the people who fire the guns: what must that do to a man’s soul? To execute with a gun, like that? No matter how righteous a man might feel about the need to end someone’s life, this can only eat away at the soul.
Something over two years ago, my better half found The Works of Charles Lamb: Volume II on a shelf of a holiday market vendor who primarily sold old prints and maps, but kept a few old books on the shelves, mainly as decoration. I’m always drawn to them and have a couple from that year.
It took me over year before I really dived deeply into this collection, inspired by the way his name keeps coming up and a realization that he really was an important man of letters in the first half of the nineteenth century, but since beginning, it’s been something I’ve regularly picked up and read and re-read sections.
This book does not contain his essays nor poetry nor his renditions of Shakespeare’s plays as stories (something he worked on with his sister). These are his letters.
The first section is heartbreaking. He is a young man, but responsible for an aging and clearly senile father (probably suffering from dementia) on a meager income from a job as a clerk. His sister, overwhelmed, it seems, by the burden of caring for her father and a difficult, invalid mother, suddenly loses it. She kills her mother with a knife and injures her father and spends a good deal of the next couple of years in and out of asylums and the homes of informal caretakers.
His letters to friends, including his close friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, are filled with heartbreak. He tries to pay for this sister’s care and cannot even afford his beloved books. He writes almost fawningly to Coleridge (and writes, less often, to Wordsworth; to Coleridge he writes as friend, but to Wordsworth, at this juncture, more as a fan).
It is such a relief to find his situation improving as he becomes, by middle age, a respected part of England’s literary establishment and a sort of tastemaker. He wrote to Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Coleridge, and others as a fellow and more or less equal literary man. He is able to visit friends and go on small trips and afford his books and magazine subscriptions. This was a time of great proliferation of journals and reviews and Lamb was a frequent contributor to them, writing satires, parodies, reviews, and essays.
Oddly, I liked his earlier letters better. They were filled with more feeling, whereas the latter, while of greater interest insofar as they are a window into the literary life of London at the time, are less deeply felt and more lighthearted. Perhaps it is the deeply feltedness of youth – the long, emotional letters to good friends and the desire for connection (and with connection, identity).
Do the French have a concept of ‘the Great French Novel?’ Or other countries – ‘the Great Canadian Novel,’ ‘the Great Chilean Novel,’ ‘the Great Russian Novel?’
Of those, I can imagine the Russians having such a concept, mainly because of figures like Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and especially Tolstoy – Tolstoy being a sort of towering figure of seeming universality. I say ‘seeming’ because I see things from my own, limited perspective and from the vantage point of being a white, heterosexual, western male (none of which are bad things, but could easily have something to do with seeing three white, heterosexual males who are part of a generally Western culture [not something universally applicable to all of Russian culture] as the candidates for the role). Also, with Russia, poetry plays a larger role in literature than America. Pasternak only wrote one novel, but reams of amazing poetry. And Pushkin is such a massive cultural figure in Russia. And Yevtushenko (who I once met) is someone who aspires to the role of being the equivalent figure (and poems like Zima Junction and especially Babi Yar aspire to a status similar to ‘the Great Russian Novel’).
Adding poetry, what would it mean to add the possible contenders for ‘the Great American Novel’ poems like Langston Hughes’ Harlem or Ginsberg’s Howl? One, a poet of color and the other a gay poet, so getting beyond the straight white thing (though not beyond the ‘male’ thing). But really, the only contender among poems would be by declaring (not without justification) Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a single, book length work.
Which hits on part of the image of the ‘the Great American Novel.’ It’s got to be big, or at least it can’t be short. The Great Gatsby is barely long enough, really. And it’s got to cover something that we see as unique to ourselves and our American identity. And the candidates tend to be white, male narratives like Huckleberry Finn or maybe On the Road.
Do more recent novels like Pynchon’s V or Delillo’s Underworld deserve inclusion (Delillo was certainly aiming for something like that)?
And where am I going with all this? I think I’ve forgotten. Something about concepts of American exceptionalism in views about a certain kind (uniquely American?) of national literature.
Thoughts?
This is one of those old Ace doubles, which means two books in one. One side has one cover and you flip it around and on the other side is the cover for a different book. This was used a lot for sci fi (and probably mysteries, too). You could take two books of less than 150 pages each and package them together. The flip side is a novel called The Caves of Mars, but I have so far only read Space Mercenaries.
I started with that one because… c’mon, space mercenaries. How cool is that?
It’s apparently the second in a sort of trilogy known as the Empress Irene books, but this one is fine as an episodic, standalone novel (it’s the second of the three). A former empress, now private citizen has taken a top class warship and become a trader and her first job is blockade running. There’s some cool stuff with Chandler’s version of hyperspace/hyperdrive/warp speed – which actually seems more like Dune style ‘folding space’ (they’re outside of space-time and there’s stuff about synchronizing and the like but… I mean, it’s all just hyperdrives, really). A lot of stuff about figuring out legal ways to open fire while smuggling and without violating space law.
The book is a fast an enjoyable read. Style-wise, it reminded me of a less didactic Gordon Dickson (though I’m basing that on a single novel by Dickson, None But Man) and it’s a decent example of silver age sci fi. If you like that stuff and you see it in a used bookstore, pick it up. If you don’t, then you’re probably not browsing the science fiction stacks anyway, so I don’t imagine that it will come up.
Myself, I found this in an awesome little bookstore in Dunedin, Florida called Back in the Day Books that is well stocked in cool little semi-rarities like this (I’ve also gotten a ton of old pulp magazines from them, as well).
Jeb’s campaign rollout has been, by and large, professional, yet also notably underwhelming, mostly, it seems through no fault of his own (welll… almost; hiring a publicly racist dude for a senior role on his campaign can be laid at his feet).
He gets public and forms the right kind of committees and everyone is all excited and there’s about to be a ‘Jeb Moment’ and then Romney comes along and takes all the wind out of his sails and there’s actually a kind of ‘Romney Moment’ (which is more than Romney got when he was actually running for president).
Okay, but Romneymentum dies down and now Jeb is poised to be ‘the guy,’ but then Scott Walker comes along, who’s everything Jeb is and more (he’s ‘establishment,’ whatever that means; been elected governor of a swing state; etc – and he’s also blue collar and has some Tea Party bona fides).
Scott Walker-mania kind of dies down and, for no discernable reason, fellow Floridian Marco Rubio suddenly becomes written about as the flavor of the moment and, even worse, as someone with some legitimate hope for winning.
It’s gotta be galling. Nothing Jeb does seems to get good reviews (his Detroit speech was pretty roundly panned with a universal, ‘meh’). Even worse his so-called strength in education has become weakness over Common Core (I say, ‘so-called,’ because, let’s face it: Florida schools sucked as much under Jeb as they do today, and the suck pretty bad today). Even worse than that, he’s being pilloried as some of moderate, which must really get under skin, because anyone who lived in Florida under Jebocracy knows that he makes Barry Goldwater look like a French socialist.
I’m not sure how I feel about all this. Obviously, I want a Democrat to win, but I’m torn, because it almost looks like he’s the next Mitt: someone who gets nominated as a smart, competent technocrat able to use his brains, corporate know how, etc to win the presidency, but who is actually unable to put together a competent campaign organization or, you know… win.
We’ve revisited Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars (also known as Barsoom).
This time, John Carter’s son, Carthoris, who inherited some, but not all of his father’s super strength (on low gravity Mars, at least) and most of his chivalry and fencing skills, is the hero.
Personally, I kind of miss John Carter, but what can you do?
So anyway… new sword fights, new allies, new enemies, new Martian/Barsoomian races, and, mercifully, few of Burroughs racial prejudices to jar you out of the story.
Oh, and, in case, you weren’t sure, Carthoris does win the love of the titular Thuvia (who is actually a princess, but Burroughs already wrote a book called A Princess of Mars).
the coffee philosopher 