Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
Author in need of a bitch-slap
No, not me, at least I’m not in any more need of a bitch-slapping than usual. Uh-uh. This guy, and for this book:
Portrait of Christopher Walken as a Young Man
Yet another adventure in Random Flickr Blogging. This week’s random number: 0382. Image shamelessly copped from Chapster.
For those of you who consider this post a little odd, I spent the last fifteen minutes of my life washing the dishes and singing (in baby talk) Romeo Void’s Never Say Never to my Tabby, Faithful.
I might like you better
If we slept together
But there’s somethin
In your eyes that says
Maybe that’s never
Never say never
There. That should put everything else into perspective.
Portrait of Christopher Walken as a Young Man
He seemed like such a nice young man . . .
Those of you who slavishly follow my every word know that I’ve been reading Tam Jones’s books all back-asswards, first Threads of Malice (reviewed here), now Ghosts in the Snow. Not that that’s a problem. As she has mentioned on her blog, she wrote Threads as a stand-alone — no knowledge of Ghosts necessary.
I think it’s a good thing that I read Threads first. Tam commits more than a few heinous acts in Threads, jaw-dropping moments when I thought: No. She didn’t. Oh sweet Lord NO, she DID! Did I read that right? She couldn’t have! . . . and so forth.
(And Tam seems so gentle and soft-spoken on her blog. It’s difficult to believe these words have flowed from her pen. Her muse must be one right bastard, a genuine Mr. Hyde.)
Anyway, thanks to Threads, I figured Tam was capable of anything — thus making Ghosts all the more suspenseful. Here’s the set-up: someone’s killing the naughty girls of Castle Faldorrah, killing them in ways that would make Jack the Ripper beam with admiration. Dubric Byerly, Castellan of Faldorrah, must find the murderer. Dubric is Faldorrah’s top cop and, thanks to a run-in decades ago with the Goddess Malanna, he’s cursed with ghosts. Specifically, the ghosts of all those who have been killed on Dubric’s watch plague him until he brings their killer to justice. Only then can Dubric rest easy.
Hell of a carrot and stick, eh?
Jury Duty
I got — perempted? Is that a word? They tossed me out on peremptory challenge. That means they didn’t like something about me. Was it . . .
A) The fact I have more than a high school education? Karen and I often wonder whether lawyers and prosecutors dislike professionals because we’re over-educated and opinionated.
B) My expressed opinion that a child endangerment charge should require some proof of actual endangerment — that the mere presence of a controlled substance should not constitute endangerment?
C) The fact I knew the defendant’s attorney but didn’t say so? She volunteered that I had taken care of one of her kids several years ago. I didn’t remember her. Correction: everyone looks vaguely familiar to me. The judge, defendant, and prosecutor all looked like they might have been my patient at one time or another. Just one of the oddities of my brain. But now I’m wondering if they thought I was a liar when I said I didn’t know any of them.
D) The fact that, whenever I wasn’t required to pay attention, I had my nose in Tamara Siler Jones‘s Ghosts in the Snow?
I suspect it was either A, B, or C, but I think D is the funniest option. Imaginary Q & A between me and the prosecutor:
Prosecutor: . . . So you seem to have some definite views on criminality. Do you have any problem with making a finding to uphold the law as stated?
Me: I don’t think I have a problem with that, but I would be more comfortable if you actually presented evidence of true criminality.
Prosecutor: “True criminality.” Can I ask what you mean by that?
Me [waving Ghosts]: Kinda like the perp in this book.
Prosecutor: Excuse me?
Me: The killer slices girls open from the chin to the pubic bone. Then he dismembers them, cuts out their organs, and eats ’em for breakfast. Now that’s true criminality.
Prosecutor: Judge?
Judge: Get the hell out of my courtroom, Dr. Hoffman.
Hee hee.
D.
Supersnark
Bam has the coversnark (postersnark?) on the upcoming Superman Returns, which leaves me with . . . what? Superman’s sexuality doesn’t interest me. After all, Larry Niven covered this subject to hell and back in his 1971 short story, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”
Niven’s story hails to us from the latter part of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, back when stories were long on concept, short on plot, character development, and, well, anything that might make you think you’ve been reading a story. There are many notable exceptions to this — Jerome Bixby’s classic, “It’s a Good Life,” Jack Vance’s “Bagatelle” (or, indeed, nearly anything else by Vance), Frederic Brown’s “Arena” (upon which the Star Trek Gorn episode was based — but, trust me, Brown’s story is much better), or Niven’s own “Inconstant Moon.” Us over-35 types could probably go on and on about the Golden Age. Still, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” has its merits.
The story is a pseudo-academic treatise on Kryptonian reproductive habits in general, and on the pitfalls of Kryptonian-human lovemaking in particular. Here’s a snip:
Lastly, he’d blow off the top of her head.
Ejaculation of semen is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other forms of terrestrial life. It would be unreasonable to assume otherwise for a kryptonian. But with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El’s semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet. (*One can imagine that the Kent home in Smallville was riddled with holes during Superboy’s puberty. And why did Lana Lang never notice that?*)
In view of the foregoing, normal sex is impossible between LL and Superman.
Artificial insemination may give us better results.
It goes on too long, in my opinion, but Niven works in enough zingers to make the trip worthwhile. Interestingly enough, he completely misses the now-popular gay hypothesis. Wonder if he’ll give us a sequel?
D.
It snuck up on me
The Book Thief
by
Markus Zusak
The Book Thief makes me think of so many things: of being ten, having to write a book report for English, and thinking of nothing better than, “This book was really good. You should read it”; of being a Jewish kid growing up in the 60s and 70s, getting force-fed the Holocaust to the point that I couldn’t take it any more.
All right, already, I wanted to tell my Hebrew School teachers. I won’t forget.
Eureka!
What I learned in my Ancient Civilizations class at Berkeley: you’re supposed to pronounce it Oy-reka. Cyrus King of Persia should be pronounced Surrus, and Darius, Dar-yoosh.
Oy-reka!
We saw elk on the way down and on the way back. Here are a few females.
We never made it to the kinetic sculpture races. We did, however, make it to CostCo and PetCo. Tells you something about our priorities. Two other things:
- I finished The Book Thief today. I cried all the way through the last 60 pages of this sumbitch. It deserves a much more comprehensive review than that, so I’m going to save it for another day. It’s GOOD, though, REALLY GOOD. Check it out over at Barnes and Noble.
- I had a great conversation with a cobbler this morning. He told me his life story, and it was a corker. The guy used to be a PhD/MPH researcher, but he gave it all up in the 70s to become a cobbler, a trade he had learned from his father and grandfather. I’d say more about him, but I do have a few local readers. I feel a little funny spilling all the stories he told me this morning. (Dummy! I could have asked his permission.) Cool guy. Meeting him was the highlight of my one-day vacation.
Did I mention yet that I passed my treadmill test with flying colors? And did you know that they had to shave off bits of my torso to attach the EKG electrodes? All weekend, I’ve been scratching my chest and belly. The remaining hair tickles the shaved areas. It’s maddening.
So I shaved it all off earlier this evening. I must look awfully weird, with my monkey arms and monkey back and naked chest & belly. Weirdest of all, though, is the fact I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I’ve never seen this body before. The last time my body was this bare, I weighed 100 pounds.
Strange stuff. Karen, to her credit, did not laugh, but even if she did, it would have been worth it. I’m not itchy any more.
D.
Zine Foo
Reptiles Magazine has an awesome cover critter this month: an adult male veiled chameleon in full display, with a baby veiled climbing on his casque. I couldn’t find the photo at the Reptiles Magazine website, so I pinched this photo from sell.com, where someone is selling baby veiled chameleons for $39 (a decent price).
This bad boy is in full aggressive display. You can tell by the black highlights, the vivid colors, and the jutting chin. His mouth is either gaping or about to gape. What pissed him off? Chances are, another male veiled. Chameleons are, to my knowledge, unique in the degree to which they despise one another. Even as tots, they will put on a vigorous show of aggression and, yes, fight each other.
In the 90s, Karen tried to raise veiled chameleons and a few other species as well. Turns out it’s easy to get them to breed. That’s the one time two adults won’t fight one another. Nevertheless, in veiled chameleons mating is not the sedate, ritualized act the nature programs would have you believe. Think Rhett raping Scarlet, with Scarlet raping Rhett right back, and you’ll have some idea of the excitement of a C. calyptratus mating.
Yes, they’ll breed and lay eggs readily enough, but getting the eggs to hatch, that’s a bitch. Even with a professional incubator, our yield rarely exceeded 10%. Not our most successful business venture, but much more fun than cleaning earwax.
Art Spiegelman (you probably know him best as the creator of Maus) has crafted a great cover for the June 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Once again, I tried finding a copy of the cover at the Harper’s website, but they’re still stuck in May mode. The cover is a cartoon showing eight stereotypical images: a black Sambo, a greedy, big-nosed Jew, a bucktoothed Asian, and so forth. Spiegelman’s article deals with the notorious Danish cartoons — and, yes, Harper’s Magazine has chosen to reprint them in full.
Spiegelman has written a brilliant piece on the history of political cartooning, and he caps it off with his critique of Danish cartoons. He rates them with a one-to-four fatwa bomb scale, a nice touch. I enjoyed his insights, and besides, any essay which pops effortlessly from South Park to Al Jazeera deserves a shout.
Also in this issue of Harper’s, novelist Kevin Baker gives us a long but meaty essay, “Stabbed in the Back,” which serves both as history and exposition of present day Republican tactics. His premise: Republicans, like post-WWI Germans, have opportunistically seized on the meme of the backstab, the betrayal by one who is close at hand. His commentary on WWII, Korea, Douglas MacArthur, and the Vietnam War was an eye-opener for Karen and me. I’m not sure I agree with his final conclusions regarding the Administration’s inevitable failure to make the same meme work vis-a-vis Iraq, but his analysis is certainly unique.
Most provocative of all is Ben Metcalf’s notebook entry, “On Simple Human Decency.” Metcalf takes over from Lewis Lapham, who has edited Harper’s for eons. His question for us is this: “Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down [deleted to keep Walnut from getting kidnapped and sent to an Eastern European torture camp] and kill him with my bare hands?”
He takes this question through some amazing and hilarious permutations. I don’t think Chimpy’s handlers will let him read this one any time soon.
On one level, this editorial works as satire, but Metcalf also has intelligent things to say about the law which forbids people to speak or write any threats against the president. But the essay flabbergasted me. I couldn’t help but think, “This guy has grapefruit-sized balls, writing this thing!” Which is why he’s featured here on Balls and Walnuts, naturally.
D.
The single best work of fiction in the last 25 years
. . . is Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
From the New York Times:
Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” [Read A. O. Scott’s essay. See a list of the judges.] Following are the results.
I find it a little mortifying that I own only one of these (Updike’s Rabbit series, of which I could tolerate only the first two or three pages). I made it through half of A Confederacy of Dunces — ultimately, I grew tired of the protagonist. I’ve been tempted by Roth’s The Plot Against America. As an alternate history, it rubs shoulders with SF.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised; I’m a genre guy. SF, fantasy, humor, hardboiled float my boat, while ‘serious’ fiction usually puts me to sleep.
Question: will any of you vouch for any one of these books? (Linked above.)
D.
Meat Loaf
No, not another recipe. I’ve never made a successful meat loaf. In fact, I’ve given up on it entirely. Even the sound of the words meat loaf makes me think of a meat-brick slathered in ketchup and baked to leathery badness.
Naw. I’m feeling weird and tired this evening, wishing I could be one of those blokes who drinks espresso at night and still gets to sleep. Even George Bush’s scraping-bottom approval ratings and Rove’s impending date with fingerprint ink can’t energize me. And that’s why I’m taking the easy way out.
Hat tip to Pat Johanneson for shouting out (A) Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out Of Meat,” available online, and (B) linking to the video dramatization of that same story. Pat got the links from BoingBoing. You don’t really need a link to BoingBoing, do you?
Recognize anyone on that “They’re Made Out Of Meat” video? How about Tom Noonan, uber-tall character actor whom I most fondly remember as Frances Dolarhyde in Michael Mann’s 1986 movie, Manhunter? Screw Anthony Hopkins’s version of Hannibal Lecktor. Brian Cox is Lecktor, just as Noonan is Frances Dolarhyde. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, rent the damned movie and see for yourself.
There. Amazing. I wrote an evening post, feeling like crap.
D.
ETA: It was bound to happen. Spock has a MySpace blog. Make sure you check out “Video 2”.