Music Sunday: "Sunday Morning Coming Down" Edition

I don't like Sundays any more.

I used to like Sundays when I was a child. Sunday was outing day. My family went on some kind of outing nearly every Sunday, even on days when my father had to work. Many times, we would just go for a ride somewhere, to see what we could see. Other Sundays, we would go to a museum, or to Griffith Park Observatory, or to Disneyland (back in the days when it didn't cost an arm and both legs to get in).

Gasoline costs too much to do that now, and I miss those outings a lot. With my arthritis, it is even difficult for me to get out and take a long walk on a Sunday. That was something we used to do as a family on Sundays, as well, sometimes just walking around town for two or three or four hours.

Not being able to have those Sunday outings any more puts me out of sorts sometimes. This is one of those Sundays, and so it has been difficult for me to get into the mood to write the usual Music Sunday blog post. There just wasn't any music that I wanted to hear. I even asked for recommendations from friends. And I got some good recommendations. Just nothing that moved me enough to share with you all.

And then I remembered "Sunday Morning Coming Down". Written by Kris Kristofferson, it was first recorded in 1969 by Ray Stevens. Kristofferson has also recorded it, as did Johnny Cash. I like this cover, which I just discovered, by Trace Adkins:



And here is Kristofferson and Cash singing the song, in 1978:



Not an upbeat song, to be sure, but it made my Sunday a little more bearable. I hope your Sunday was better, wherever you are.

Just a note: I've seen this song identified both as "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down". I have no idea which is correct.

Music Sunday: Music Plus Book Review Edition

I grew up listening to rock music. I also spent a lot of that time reading the writing of Robert Hilburn, the legendary music critic for the Los Angeles Times. So, when I discovered that Hilburn had written a memoir, Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales From a Rock’n’Roll Life (Rodale, 2009; 280 pages), I had to read it.

I’m glad I did.

Hilburn, who wrote his first story as a freelancer for the Times in 1966 and was hired as full-time pop music critic and editor in 1970, is a fabulous writer. He spent his career at one of the epicenters of the music industry, and he writes about his adventures with grace and wit and a great deal of insight. As part of his job, he met and interviewed and reviewed the biggest and most legendary names in music, and became friends with not a few of them. These friendships did not stop Hilburn from calling these performers on the missteps in their recordings and in performance, although he writes about being worried that his relationships with these artists could be seen as a conflict or interest or result in bias toward them.

Hilburn also writes about his questions concerning continuing to write about music aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults as he aged, addressing his doubts in the context of covering musicians who kept making music, sometimes relevant, sometimes not so much, as they aged. I found this interesting as a person of a certain age who still loves rock music but finds fewer and fewer new artists whose work I can relate to as I get older. Hilburn quotes Paul McCartney on the subject, recalls that at one point Mick Jagger said that he couldn't envision still singing “Satisfaction” at the age of thirty but has continued singing it much longer than that, and celebrates the fact that Johnny Cash’s work remained relevant until the end of his life.

Then there are the stories. Hilburn recalls being the person John Lennon would call to spend an evening with during Lennon's year-and-a-half long “lost weekend”, spent primarily in Los Angeles, when he needed to remain relatively sober to get up for an early meeting the next day. He relates serious and deep discussions he had about the music with Bruce Springsteen. He talks about the difficulties inherent in interviewing people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. He explores his ability to connect with musicians much younger than himself, such as Kurt Cobain, and from very different backgrounds, such as Ice Cube. He describes hanging out with the members of U2 in and out of the recording studio.

In the course of all this, Hilburn pulls no punches in writing about artists he admires and those he finds, following Bob Dylan’s three categories of musicians, “superficial”, which in Hilburn’s eyes includes some very big name acts and musicians. But Hilburn spends much less time on the superficial than he does on the natural performers and the supernatural performers, Dylan’s two other categories.

I’ll leave you to read the book to discover how various performers Hilburn discusses fit into which category. If you think this is my way of making you read the book rather than giving away the good parts, you’re absolutely correct. Every music lover should read Corn Flakes with John Lennon.

Because it is Music Sunday, I’m going to end this review with three of the artists and performances mentioned by Hilburn in the course of his book.

One of the musicians that Hilburn had a friendship with was Johnny Cash. He calls Cash's cover of "Hurt" "stirring" (p. 194):



Another artist Hilburn has high praise for is Bruce Springsteen, whose "Brilliant Disguise" Hilburn described as "a chilling reflection about commitment" (p. 148):



Hilburn said that U2's album, "The Unforgettable Fire" "confused" him, but he called two of the songs on the album, "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "Bad", "brilliant" (p. 141). Just last week, I shared the band's performance of "Bad" at Live Aid, so here is "Pride":

Sweet frustrations...

As a compulsive and voracious reader, I get frustrated when I can’t find something to read.

You would probably laugh at that statement if you could see where I’m living. Between my roommate and myself, there must be at least a couple of thousand books in the apartment. I have not come close to reading all of them.

Still, sometimes I find myself wandering from bookshelf to bookshelf, repeating the lament, “But I can’t find anything to read.”

I know. Cue the violins and the weeping.

It sounds stupid, but it is a real problem. While I love to read, there are books – there are whole genres, really – that I’m not that keen to read. And even within the genres of fiction and topics in non-fiction that I do enjoy reading, I’m not in the mood to read all the books all the time. If I’ve read three mysteries in a row, for example, I’d probably want to read something else before I read another mystery.

I’ve had this problem a lot lately, and I go through periods like this from time to time. It gets so that I just can’t find anything I want to read. I suspect that the current troubles are at least partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing a lot, and I don’t want what I’m reading to bleed through into what I’m writing.

I’m not really worried about ideas creeping from my reading into my writing, but more about tone and voice. One time, last year, I was working on something that I was writing in third-person omniscient. Then I started reading a book that was written in the first person. Imagine my surprise (and dismay), when I realized that I’d written the last several thousand words in first-person rather than third.

Sigh. I haven’t gone back to that project yet.

However, I’m not here to complain, but to say that I’ve managed to find myself an embarrassment of riches. I’ve got two books, both out of the library, that are, at least so far, fantastic. They’re both so good that I wish I could read both at the same time. When I sit down to read, it is difficult for me to decide which one I want to spend time with.

(Actually, the main reason I’m writing this rather than reading right now is that, when I sat down intending to read for a while before starting dinner, I couldn't decide which one I wanted to pick up.)

One is fiction, 11/22/63 (Scribner, 2011; 849 pages), by Stephen King. I found this one at the library on Monday, sat down and started reading just to see if I was going to like it – it has gotten good reviews, but I haven’t felt moved to pick up any of King’s work in several years – and found it mesmerizing from the first pages. The other is Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock’n’Roll Life (Rodale, 2009; 280 pages), by rock critic Robert Hilburn, who wrote for the Los Angeles Times for many years. I read Hilburn’s work in the Times for years and I love books on rock music, so when I found it today I could resist picking it up when I went to take some other books (books that looked good, but which ended up not catching my interest when I started to read them) back to the library.

I used to have this problem, having two (or more) good books to read at the same time, a lot. I don’t know if it is because I’ve read many more books by now, or if there just aren’t as many good books coming out now, or that I’m just getting picky in my old age. Whatever the case, I rarely have two good reads in hand at the same time now.

I plan to enjoy this sweet frustration, and hope that this is a sign that it will happen more often.

Because, man, I really do get cranky when I can’t find anything good to read.

Book Review: "The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To", by D C Pierson

The other day when I was at the library, I picked a book up off the shelf because it had such an improbable title: The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (2010, Vintage Books/Random House; 226 pages). How was I supposed to resist a title like that?

Maybe that was author D C Pierson's strategy in picking the title. If it was, it was a good approach. It also describes the premise of the book quite well. Eric Lederer is a high school student, one of those who a lot of the rest of the students at his school have pegged as mostly likely to shoot the school up. He's a loner, a geek who is probably a little too intelligent for his own good. He just doesn't fit in. But, one day he approaches Darren Bennett, another student, the become fast friends, and Eric soon confesses that he doesn't sleep.

Of course, Darren's first reaction is what most of ours would be: so, don't drink so much caffeine. To which Eric's response is something along the lines of, "Dude, you don't understand..." Soon, the two boys are planning a multi-film epic that will be tied together with comic books and video games and, inevitably, a television series.

But, the course of true friendship and entertainment-moguldom is never an easy path, and...stuff happens. It would be unfair to say more.

Pierson is a good young writer, who has claimed J. D. Salinger as one of his influences. As far as I'm concerned, he has written a much better book than anything I've ever read of Salinger's. I find Salinger's work unpleasant and his characters (principally Holden Caulfield) impossible to like or to sympathize with. On the other hand, Pierson has created in Eric and Darren two characters who do stupid things, sometimes colossally stupid things, and sometimes mean things. There were a couple of points while reading the book where I would have cheerfully throttled both of them. But I continued to like them and to pull for them to work it all out.

I like this book more than I like most novels that are meant to be literary, rather than genre, works. And, The Boy... was clearly meant to be a literary novel. But deep down, this is a fantasy novel, and I like it all the more for that.

Music Sunday: Live Aid Anniversary Edition

Twenty-seven years ago last Friday, Live Aid was unleashed on the world. I remember that day; I spent it sitting in front of the television watching the coverage on MTV. I saw nearly the whole broadcast. I might have napped a couple of times during the day, but I got up early and stayed until the end. It was an amazing, interesting day.

Oh, not all of the performance were wonderful, to be sure. But even some of the not-so-good performances were fun to watch, and it was all in a good cause, to raise money and awareness regarding victims of famine in Ethiopia. The whole thing was organized by Bob Geldof, who had earlier organized the Band Aid benefit single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and Midge Ure, and they did an amazing job considering the logistics of putting together two all-star concerts that would take place simultaneously in two hemispheres. And, yes, there were criticisms later about the money-raising aspects of the show, and accusations (some of them long after the fact) that not all the money went where it was supposed to go. Be that as it may, it was a remarkable day of music, put together and pulled off much more successfully than anyone could have expected.

One of the most vivid memories I have of the day is the performance by U2. I had probably heard of the band before that day, but I wasn't really aware of them. Looking back, though, I think one of the most remarkable aspects of their performance is being able to see the beginnings of Bono's ability to hold a huge audience in the palm of his hand, especially here, as he sang "Bad", which has come to be one of my favorite U2 songs.



And, yes, he really can do that palm of the hand thing. I saw U2 on its Oakland, California, stop during its Zoo TV tour in1992, and witnessed this live and in person.

However, at Live Aid, Bono was still an amateur in the art of holding a big audience. Later that afternoon, also at the London venue of the concert, Freddie Mercury and Queen held the master class in uniting an audience into one entity and turning them to the band's purpose. The performance has been cited widely as the best live rock performance ever, and I'm inclined to agree. No, really. Just watch. It's remarkable:



There have been attempts since to recreate the success of Live Aid, mostly to lesser success. I think it can be compared to Woodstock in that respect. The 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, for all of its problems, was a once in a lifetime event, and attempts to recreate it (notably the Rolling Stones' disastrous free concert at Altamont Speedway and the efforts to hold sequels to the original Woodstock in 1979, 1989, and 1994) were clearly not in a class with the original.

Speaking of Woodstock, Crosby Stills, and Nash, who appeared at Woodstock in 1969 (in one of their first live performances), appeared at the Philadelphia venue of Live Aid, singing "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", among other songs:



Their performance that day isn't their best ever, vocally speaking, but as someone who remembers the original Woodstock (and spent the weekend wishing I was there, despite the rain and mud and logistical problems), I appreciate the link between the two events. And, having seen CSN perform live, I can attest to the fact that when they are on vocally, the results are beautiful.

The Who also performed at both Woodstock and Live Aid, but with a slightly different line-up since, by the time of Live Aid, Keith Moon had already died.



Also performing at both Live Aid and Woodstock were Joan Baez, Carlos Santana and Neil Young, who performed as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Woodstock. Baez even managed to invoke Woodstock as part of her performance:



I'm not sure if Live Aid really was that generation's Woodstock, as Baez called it, but it was a remarkable musical event.

Public speaking - I'm not afraid. Are you?

Yesterday, I did something that would make many people flip out. That is, I stood up in front of people and talked.

It went fairly well. I survived, and so did the people who had to sit there and listen to me. I'm sure that I said "um" and "uh" too many times, and one of those who listened to me told me afterward that he was distracted by by glasses sitting too low on my nose (he said he kept wondering if they were going to fall off). But, I also got compliments on my part of the presentation (there were two others who also spoke), and I feel pretty good about the whole experience.

I think it is interesting that there have been polls indicating that most people are more afraid of getting up and speaking in front of an audience than they are of dying. That seems pretty extreme to me. But, I've got things I'm frightened of, too, so I'm really in no position to judge. Honestly, though, I've never been afraid of speaking before groups, large and small.

This probably has something to do with the fact that I've been up in front of people enough in my life that it seems natural to me.

I don't even really remember the first time I was up in front of an audience, but I've heard the stories and seen photos. I was about two years old, and the event was a fashion show to show off sewing projects by high school students. My aunt had made a dress that was my size, and I modeled it in the show. Apparently, I had fun. I've been told that I wanted to go back and walk the runway again. Alas (and probably fortunately), that was both the beginning and the end of my career as a fashion model.

Then, there was the Christmas play I was in when I was five years old. I have a few fleeting memories of that, and none of those memories include being reluctant to go on stage. What I remember more clearly about that night was it being horribly foggy when it was time to go to the (Methodist) church for the play but it being clear as a bell and windy when we emerged from the church basement a couple of hours later.

During elementary school, I was required to speak in front of the whole school a number of times. I was in speech therapy beginning in second grade (I had a lisp), and nearly every time there was a need for a student to speak in an assembly, I was elected because it would be "good for me" to practice my non-lisping speech. I also was in my school band and, in sixth grade, all-district band, which meant being on-stage for performances. I didn't do as much of that sort of thing in junior high or high school, although I was onstage in a pageant at Shakespeare Festival in 9th grade.

Later on, during the time I was a Mormon, I was sometimes asked to give talks in church, teach Sunday School or Relief Society classes, and so forth, which gave me more experience talking in front of an audience. So did being involved in community theatre (although I usually did behind the scenes, backstage work rather than being on stage), holding offices and campaigning for offices while I was involved in Phi Theta Kappa honor society, and other random things I've done through the years.

All of this means that I've been up in front of an audience - ranging from a few people to, in a few cases, a few hundred people - enough that it makes sense for me not to get too anxious or upset about it. On the other hand, there are people who make a living getting up in front of an audience who report getting sick nearly every time, even after years of experience.

Maybe I'm just a ham (some of my friends would probably say that there is no "maybe" about it). Maybe it's something genetic. Whatever the cause, I'm glad that I'm able to have fun with getting up in front of groups and speaking. I've seen too many people just miserable about even having to get up in a class and do a presentation. And by miserable, I mean sweaty-palmed, tongue-tied, run-to-the-bathroom-to-ralph miserable. And I don't want to have to go through that kind of miserable.

Music Sunday: Happy Birthday Edition...

Here in the United States, we celebrated our nation's birthday this week, with all of the food, fireworks and patriotic music that implies. It put me in mind of the July 4th I spent, many years ago, riding around north Wales and discovering that one of the radio stations there was actually playing John Phillip Sousa marches and other patriotic songs from the US. It was interesting to me that they would do that, and it was kind of fun spending that gray, rainy (until late afternoon, when the sun came out) day seeing green hills, sheep and cows, small Welsh villages and, occasionally, the ruins of a castle on a distant hilltop, and listening to American patriotic music.

But, since I'm really not a huge fan of that genre of music, I thought I'd take a look and see who in the music world celebrated their birthdays in the past week, and share some of their music with you.

It was Ringo Starr's birthday on July 7. I've shared music from The Beatles here before, more than once, but I thought I'd share one of the songs Starr recorded after he left the band. This one, "It Don't Come Easy", is my favorite of his post-Beatles career, if for nothing else the line, "I don't ask for much/I only want trust":



It was also Robbie Robertson's birthday this week, on July 5. Robertson, of course, had a long career with The Band, but he has also done some interesting solo work. This song, "Somewhere Down the Crazy River", is my favorite of his work away from The Band:



Huey Lewis also celebrated a birthday on July 5. He had a number of hits with his band, The News but, again, I thought I would share some of his work from outside his usual habitat, "Cruisin'" recorded with Gweneth Paltrow, from the film Duets.



From the world of country music, Toby Keith is celebrating his birthday today, July 8. He has recorded a number of songs that could be classed as patriotic music, and created more than a little controversy with some of it. But I first became aware of his work with this song, "How Do You Like Me Now?" How many of us haven't wanted to go back and tell someone from our past, "Hey, look at me now. Not as bad as you thought, huh?" But the video doesn't take the easy way out; he didn't get the girl in high school, and he doesn't get her when comes back twenty years later, either. It's a fun song and a clever video:



And then, just to wrap things up and come 'round full circle to The Beatles, here is Paul McCartney, singing "Birthday" to Ringo Starr a couple of years ago at a show at Radio City Music Hall:

Thoughts about fashion and news on a Friday night...

I saw an item the other day while I was reading on the Internet that Kate Middleton - excuse me, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; not being British, I don't understand the ins and outs of properly referring to royalty, so I had to look that up - wore a dress to Wimbledon the other day that she had, heaven help us all, worn before.

This item - I refuse to call it a news story, because it is my position that what anyone wears, even royalty, isn't important enough to rise to the status of news - has been on my mind every since. I don't understand the mindset that, above a certain rank or social class or level wealth, there is something, I don't know, untoward, about a woman wearing an outfit more than once.

Yes, I understand the concept of conspicuous consumption and that it is one of the ways that people impress upon the world that they are of higher class, rank, or wealth. That is, I understand it intellectually. Emotionally and logically, I don't get it at all, especially the part where the press, the gossips, and sometimes people in general, take such people to task if they don't cooperate with the program and go ahead and wear something more than once.

I have to admit that my first reaction when I read the item was to think, "So what?" Still, the very fact that someone thought to write about it, and someone else facilitated its publication on a widely-enough website (I think it was Yahoo! News) that I would run across the item. I don't seek out gossip columns or stories about British royalty.

Later on, however, it occurred to me to wonder what message such stories send to the people who read them, and whether these message are inadvertent or deliberate. Are we meant to envy the person, this time the Duchess, who can afford to be seen in public only once in an outfit? Are we to admire the wealth that it takes to be able to do that? Are we to aspire to such wealth? Or are we meant to simply feel put in our places or reminded that we are certainly not the equal of someone of that rank and wealth, and probably never will be?

Or is the message meant not for the masses, but for the Duchess herself, that she should be ashamed of herself for betraying her adopted station in life? Was it meant to shame her into getting with the program of conspicuous consumption?

I suspect that Kate doesn't give a rip that anyone noticed that she was wearing something she had worn before. There have been items published previously detailing her fondness for shopping at stores those who are not married to the future King of England can also afford. She might even have laughed, had she seen the item.

The question is, should we care? Obviously, someone wants us to. After all, the story was written, and it was published. And whether or not there was a deliberate message intended, the item set off this string of thoughts in my mind. I assume that I am not the only one whose thoughts wandered in the same direction when they saw the story

I don't think we should care what the Duchess wears, or how many times she wears each item of clothing. But I think I do care that this is what we get in our daily news feeds, with a prominent enough headline that I noticed the item. There are important and serious things going on in the world. What someone wears, even if that someone is the future Queen of England, really isn't important in the grand scheme of things.

Music Sunday - Academy Award-winning Songs Edition...

I've been thinking about movie music this week, and about the songs that have won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

The songs in this category, which was not introduced until the 7th ceremony, for films released in 1934), must have been written specifically for the film in which they appear, and the award goes to the songwriters, not the singer/s of the song in the film, although there have been several instances of a songwriter also being the singer in the film.

Probably the best place to start is the winner in 1939, from The Wizard of Oz: "Over the Rainbow", written by Harold Arlen (Music) and Yip Harburg (Lyrics), and sung in the film by Judy Garland. This is a good place to start because the American Film Institute has named this the greatest movie song of all time. And it is one of my favorites. Here is how it appears in the movie:



My favorite Best Song winner, however, is this one, "The Windmills of Your Mind", written by Michel Legrand (music) and Alan and Marilyn Bergman (Lyrics), which appeared in the 1968 film, The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Steve McQueen. Sung by Noel Harrison (also an actor and the son of actor Rex Harrison), its use in the film is, I think, perfect:



The song, and the performance of the song fit perfectly, I think, the visuals that accompany it.

In the remake of the film, which starred Pierce Brosnan (and which I have not seen), the song is covered by Sting. I've heard that version, and while it is not bad, I don't like it nearly as much as the original.

Another interesting Best Original Song winner is, as unlikely as it seems, from the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), by Jay Livingston (music) and Ray Evans (Lyrics). "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" (the order of the song title was changed to "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for purposes of the ceremony), which became Doris Day's signature song, usually gets a lighthearted reading in performance. Not so in the film, where it is also performed by Doris Day:



Also bearing mention, historically speaking, is "Evergreen", from the Barbra Streisand version of A Star is Born. When this song won Best Original Song, Streisand became the first woman to win in the category for composing the music, as opposed to writing the lyrics (which were written by Paul Williams). The song also won the Golden Globe that year for Best Original Song, and Streisand won a Grammy for it for Song of the Year. It is also a good song, used effectively in the film, where she sings it with Kris Kristofferson:



In the past couple of decades, more songwriters from the rock, pop, and other contemporary music world have won Academy Awards for Best Original Song. Perhaps most notable is Bruce Springsteen's win, in 1993, for "Streets of Philadelphia", from the Tom Hanks/Denzel Washington film Philadelphia, for writing both the music and the lyrics:



Apologies for the poor quality of the sound after the song itself, but I couldn't find a video of the use of the song in the film. This performance of the song, from the Academy Award ceremonies, is wonderful, but whoever posted the clip was not as careful at the end, when Springsteen made his acceptance speech, and there is some background noise.

Other winners from the rock/pop/rap world include, Phil Collins, who has been nominated three times and won for "You'll Be in My Heart", from Tarzan; Lionel Richie, who won for "Say You, Say Me", from White Nights; Elton John, who wrote the music of "Can You Feel The Love Tonight", from The Lion King; Bob Dylan, for "Things Have Changed", from Wonder Boys; Annie Lennox, who collaborated on the music and lyrics for "Into The West", from Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; and, perhaps most surprisingly (for me, at least), Eminem won for writing the lyrics to "Lose Yourself", from 8 Mile. My surprise comes not so much from has having written winning lyrics, but from the Academy voting for the song. And, on another historical note, Melissa Etheridge won for writing "I Need to Wake Up", from An Inconvenient Truth, marking the first time a song from a documentary had won in the category.

For me, one of the most interesting things about the history of Best Original Song winners is that even though I'm both a music fan and a film fan, there are so many of the songs, both winners and nominees, that I don't know at all. While some were hits, others seem to have made no mark on he world outside of the film they appeared in, at least in any venue that I am aware of.

Half-year reading review...

It's time to do my half-year reading summary, since midnight tonight marks the halfway point in the year. I'm not sure where the time has gone, but I've apparently spent at least some of it reading.

This list comes from the Reading Challenge thread over at Ravelry (if you don't know what Ravelry is, Google it), where some of us set a goal for reading for the year and then keep track of what we've read while trying to reach that goal.

I'm not doing too badly so far this year. My goal is to read 40 books this year, and as of a couple of days ago, I've finished 19 books, which is just one below a pace to meet my goal for the year. That's much better than I did last year.

I've posted reviews of many of these books either here or over at my reading and literature blog. That blog decided to go all wonky a few weeks ago, so I won't link to that, although I might try to salvage a few of the reviews later on to post over here.

Looking back over the list, I can only find one that I probably wouldn't recommend - Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman. I'm not sure why I even finished reading it. I'm not shy about giving up on books that I don't like. Still, for some reason I kept reading. When I reached the end of the novel, however, and discovered the cheat Freedman had pulled, I was sorry I had given so much time to it.

I think my favorites from the list are Life, By Keith Richards, with James Fox, on the non-fiction side, while my favorite novel on the list is A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness. I'm looking forward to the sequel, which comes out in a couple of weeks. I also really liked Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins, which I was lucky enough to read before it was published as one of Ms. Collins' beta readers. It's available now as an e-book, and I'd recommend you look for it, especially if you like romance-spiced contemporary mysteries with an historic hook.

Aside from the one book I mentioned earlier, I liked all of the books I've read so far this year, although I did have quibbles with one or two, including Restless Souls, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate. The review is here somewhere, if you'd like to find out exactly what those quibbles were.

Anyway, here is the list. Maybe you can find something here that you haven't read and might like to spend some time with. For myself, I just hope I can find as many books I will enjoy as much as the books I read in the first half of the year.

January
(1) Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969, by William J. Mann (422 pages)
(2) Gun Games, by Faye Kellerman (375 pages)
(3) Red Mist, by Patricia Cornwell (498 pages)
(4) Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong (309 pages)

February
(5) Hotel Transylvania, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (252 pages)
(6) Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly (255 pages)

March
(7) Hangman, by Faye Kellerman (422 pages)
(8) Blood and Ice, by Robert Masello (675 pages)
(9) Victims, by Jonathan Kellerman (338 pages)

April
(10) A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness (579 pages)
(11) Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate (381 pages)
(12) Role Models, by John Waters (304 pages)
(13) Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox (564 pages)

May
(14) Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman (414 pages)
(15) Dead Time, by Stephen White (400 pages)
(16) Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins (377 pages)

June
(17) The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns, by Catherine Whitney (250 pages)
(18) The Blackbird Papers, by Ian Smith (326 pages)
(19) Virgin, by F. Paul Wilson (309 pages)

My next task is to find something good to read. I've started a couple of novels since I finished reading Virgin, and I've put both of them down in disappointment. I might revisit one of them, to give it a few more pages, but I doubt I'll like it any more than what I've already read.

In which I vent after a less than satisfying day...

I try to not use this space to moan too much about my personal stuff. I know no one wants to hear (read) it when I'm having a bad day. And most of what I have to complain about are decidedly first world problems, and much less serious than what other people are going through.

I understand that.

But, every once in awhile, I just have to vent. This is one of those times*

Start with the firecrackers that have been going off every night for the past three in my neighborhood, since they are the most immediate issue. Apparently, some of my neighbors either don't have a calendar or don't know how to read the one they have. The Fourth isn't until next week, people. I don't have anything against fireworks (except for their unfortunate tendency to start fires and blow peoples fingers and faces off sometimes), but I don't want to hear them every single night. A couple of nights ago, it sounded like they had a cannon out there.

Second of all, I haven't been able to concentrate at all today to get any writing done. It's been going really well since the end of last week. I've started the second draft of the novel I'm working on, and I've written nearly 11,000 words since last Friday night. Now? Nothing. I sat here and stared at the computer monitor for ages tonight, and...crickets.

Now, I know myself and my writing habits well enough to know that these things go in cycles, and that in a day or two I'll be on track again. At times like this, however, knowing that doesn't help.

So, after I gave up working on the novel, I figured I could get a newsletter I'm responsible for publishing up and going. I have a Saturday night deadline on that, and much of it is already written. But, I need to get everything into one document and formatted. Except, I couldn't get the reformatting to work, no matter what I did. I finally gave up on that, too. I try not to be a quitter, but it was either that or throw my laptop across the room, and that wouldn't have made anybody happy.

And then there's the job search. Nothing going on there, either. On the rare occasion I find a job posting that I have qualifications for, a talent for, and half a chance of getting, it turns out to be too far away for it to be practical for me to apply, considering that I cannot afford to relocate. As Roseanne Roseannadanna (the Sainted Gilda Radner) used to say on the old (good) Saturday Night Live, "It's always something."

I could just give up and go to bed. I've gotten the things I really needed to do, done today. Had a meeting at CVP, which went well, and where I volunteered to help with my committee's presentation during Seminar Week in a couple of weeks. I watered the plants (and discovered that I've got lots of cherry tomatoes on the vine and ripening). I washed dishes. I did the grocery shopping that I needed to do.

The hang-up with going to bed now, though, is that it isn't even 10 p.m. If I go to bed now, I'll wake up at three in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep. Since I don't have to get up early in the morning, that idea is a nonstarter. I might be able to find a book to start reading, but in the mood I'm in that's probably a long-shot.

Ah, well. I've probably vented enough for now, and it's served it's purpose; I feel slightly calmer now than I did when I started writing about half an hour ago or so.


So, if you've gotten this far, thanks for reading. I promise this isn't going to turn into an "oh-poor-me" blog. It's just been one of those days.


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*Five extra points to whoever can identify the movie this line comes from.

Book Review: "Virgin", by F. Paul Wilson

Virgin (Borderlands Press, 2007; 309 pages), by F. Paul Wilson, is an odd book.

This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. I can’t remember the last time I read a book where it took so long to figure out where it was going. Again, not a bad thing, although I did nearly give up on it about a quarter of the way in, just because I wasn't sure what the writer was up to.

It starts out with the discovery, in 1991, of an ancient manuscript in the wilderness of Israel. Some years later, two manuscripts surface, written in an archaic form of Aramaic, seemingly authentic...until it turns out that the words were written with ink that was only a few years old.

One of the manuscripts, along with a translation of the text, ends up in the hands of a Roman Catholic priest in New York, given to him by a friend who thinks he will get a kick out of it. But there is a Shin Bet agent who is after the manuscripts, and he is willing to kill to get them back.

Who is the agent? Why does he want the forged manuscripts so badly? What or who is he protecting? And who is he, really?

There is much more to the story, including a US Senator with aspirations to the presidency with secrets of his own and a nun who is determined to find what the priest’s manuscript says is hidden. To say much more than that would be to take all the fun out of the reading of this novel.

It would be easy to say that Wilson set out, in Virgin, to out-Dan Brown Dan Brown. And there is an element of that to the novel. But Wilson takes a different, much more original tack to the genre than Dan Brown could ever have managed.

I do have to say that I didn't find the resolution to the novel to be completely satisfying, but that has to do with my own personal outlook and not with anything in the storytelling. And, the quibble I have with it is so small within the whole that it didn't bother me enough to ruin my enjoyment of the reading experience as a whole, considering that the larger message was something that had me nodding my head in agreement as I read the last few pages of the book.

I've not read anything by Wilson before, but on the strength of my experience in reading Virgin, I suspect that I will be seeking out more of his work.

Music Sunday: The Looking for Work Edition

This is going to be an unusual Music Sunday, I think, because I haven't had the time to focus on music very much this week.

You see, I'm looking for work. I have been for a few months now, and so far all I've got is crickets. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm not what you'd call a traditional professional. I'm a writer, editor, and proofreader, and while there are other things I can do, I don't have the on-paper qualifications a lot of employers think they need from their employees. I'd like to think that the fact that I am very good at the things I do would at least partly make up for that, but with the economy as it is, job-hunting is kind of a crap-shoot. Right now I'm convinced that the odds of finding a real job are worse than the odds casinos offer to gamblers.

The result of all of this is that I start to feel guilty if I'm not actually engaged in looking for work, or doing my volunteer hours at Central Valley Professionals, where I recently took a week-long seminar in job-search techniques, or doing something else to actively find work. Even though I know that I can only spend so many hours a day working on the search, I still feel guilty when I'm not either looking or thinking about looking. That translates into little time and little inclination to think about music.

Being a writer, however, means that I've also got writing projects going. I've written a little bit about those here in the past. One is a non-fiction project and the other is a novel. I don't feel quite so guilty when I'm working on those; I'm working, even if there is not an immediate pay-off for those projects. At least I'm doing something productive.

And this is where the music comes in. There aren't many songs about writing, really. But there is Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark", which is at least in part about a writing frustrated with just sitting and trying to write his book. Appropriate, I think for the week I've had, although I'm not that frustrated with my writing at the moment, as I've written well over 5,000 words this weekend so far.



Then there is this promotional video, from before music videos were a thing, for The Beatles "Paperback Writer", about the frustrations surrounding trying to get published. It is really the only other rock song I can think of that has to do with writing. Let me know if you know of others.



So, it's back to the salt mines for me, even on Sunday. One of these days, the books I'm writing will be finished - and published one way or another. At least these days there is the option of self-publishing. There's still a stigma to that, but things are getting better on that front, I think. And, maybe one day I'll actually find a job.

Not holding my breath, you understand, but the economy can't stay this crappy forever. Can it?

Was your weekend as busy as mine was?...

Yes. Today is Monday. Yesterday was Sunday, and was meant to be Music Sunday.

It was, as you might have noticed, not.

There is an explanation for that. I was otherwise engaged all weekend at an event for an organization that I belong to...in other words, it was Anniversary weekend for the Barony of Nordwache, Kingdom of Caid, Society for Creative Anachronism. That means that I was busy all weekend, from early Friday morning until late afternoon Sunday.

I was not nearly as busy there as some other people, but I did do several hours of volunteer work, sitting at Gate and running the Silent Auction. Additionally, it was hot at the event, which involved camping...and there was no air conditioning aside from the occasional breeze. I don't do heat, so I was exhausted by the time I got home. I did actually sit down and attempt to write and post the Music Sunday post yesterday evening, but I wasn't braining very well, as an imaginary* friend of mine has been known to put it.

Actually, I'm still not braining all that well today. I've also got dishes to do, and laundry to check to see if it's dry yet, and straightening, vacuuming, and mopping to clean up after having guests for two weeks. Three adults, two medium to large dogs and, occasionally, a five-year-old child in a two-bedroom apartment is a little crowded, and things tend to not stay neat and tidy. But roommate, her son and granddaughter, and the two dogs, are now gone on summer vacation, leaving room to actually do some cleaning up.

So, Music Sunday hasn't disappeared. It just went on hiatus for a week. I might even post a video or two along he way between now and then, if the spirit strikes me. No promises, but it could happen...so stay tuned.
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*An imaginary friend is someone I know online but not in real life.

Music Sunday - The Late Sixties/Early Seventies Edition

I like new music, old music, most kinds of music. It seems to me, however, that the period between 1967 and 1973 or so produced an amazing variety of good music - or at least a lot of music I liked when it came out and still like listening to today.

The thing that got me thinking about this this week was a surprise re-hearing of a song from 1969, "Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town)", by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. It was a song I liked when it was released, but I had nearly forgotten about it in the intervening years and it kind of surprised me to discover how glad I was to hear it again after so long. When it came on, I cranked the volume on the radio in the car and sang along - for some reason I tend to remember the lyrics of songs that I haven't heard in years - and despite the content of the song, just having heard it seemed to put me in a much better mood simply because I'd heard it.

Not that this is a song with fun, upbeat lyrics. Released during the height of US involvement in Vietnam, it tells the story of a man who was injured in the war, something that wsn't talked about a lot at the time, even with protests against the war heating up across the country and around the world. But it is a good song, and a good song is always a good thing.



Looking around for other songs from the time, I found a couple of others that are just as good, and just as good today as they were when they were recorded, also in 1969, even though they are much different than "Ruby". I found this 1989 performance by B. B. King of his 1969 hit "The Thrill Is Gone":



And then, for something completely different from either "Ruby" or "The Thrill Is Gone", there is "Come Together", the last song the Beatles ever recorded with all four of the band's members in the studio at the same time.



I think it is only appropriate to also include this song, from the following year, while the Beatles were in the process of breaking up. This is one of the first of Paul McCartney's songs as a solo artist, "Maybe I'm Amazed" which, for my money, is one of the most interesting love songs I've ever heard, and far from his later "silly love songs" period.



And, because I can, I'm going to include this song from a little earlier, The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", from 1965. I've never been able to figure out if this is a song of rationalization or apology, but I've always liked it.



From a little later than the first songs this week, this is a live performance of "Heart of Gold", by Neil Young, from 1971 or 1972. I was lucky enough to see Young perform this song live in 1973. You'll have to bear with the first minute or two of the video, with Young searching for the right harmonica before he performs the song, but its worth the wait. And, really, it's kind of amusing watching him pull boxes out of various pockets before he finds the instrument he wants.



That's what? Six songs? I could post quite a few more, but this is probably enough for one Sunday. Enjoy.

Oh, and I'd love it if you'd drop a comment telling me about your favorte songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Sigh...

Ray Bradbury died Tuesday night, at the age of 91, and I am very sad about it.

It isn't that he didn't live a long, full life. He did. But now there won't be any new stories from him, and that is sad for his millions of readers. I've been one of those readers for many years now - since the age of about eight, when my father brought me a copy of one of Bradbury's short story collections when I was stuck home in bed with almost-pneumonia.

I honestly can't remember which collection it was (although I think it might have been R is for Rocket), or which stories were in it. That was a very long time ago. But I do remember reading his stories, loving them. I remember being entranced that he could take a series of short stories and weave them in and around each other so that when I think of books such as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, I think of them as novels and not as collections of short stories, which was what they really were.

He did write actual novels as well. Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind, of course, as does Something Wicked This Way Comes. Somehow, I just read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time a couple of years ago, in the context of a public marathon read-aloud sponsored by my local library system. I got to participate as a reader and had a wonderful time. It was a unique and lovely way to finally read a book that manages to project hope even out of a story set in a dystopian future.

Bradbury was, above all, a storyteller, and he could do that sitting in front of an audience and talking as well as or better than he could on paper. I had the good fortune to hear him speak one year at LosCon, in the main ballroom at the Burbank Airport Hilton. The room was full, or close to it, and he held his audience in the palm of his hand for close to two hours, telling stories of writing short stories and novels, of screenwriting and playwriting, and of the writers and others he knew along the way. Among other things he said that day, he confirmed the story that he had actually heard L. Ron Hubbard say, as has been attributed to him and has also been called an urban legend, that the easiest way to make a million dollars is to start a religion...before Hubbard ever invented Scientology.

That book of Bradbury short stories that my father brought me when I was a child was...I guess you could call it a gateway drug into my love of science fiction. And, really, fantasy as well, because in many of Bradbury's stories, the line between fantasy and science fiction was fine, and sometimes nonexistent. It was one of the first science fiction books my father handed me to read, one of the first of many, and it was probably a good place to start, a good writer to start with, because throughout his writing, and his life, Bradbury was able to maintain a childlike wonder about the world and the universe and he was able, as well, to project that wonder onto the page and into the consciousness of his readers.

If there is anything this world needs, especially today, it is a sense of childlike wonder. We still needed Ray Bradbury in the world. But, since he is gone now, as many of us as are able need to take up the torch and carry it along with us and spread it as far as we possibly can.

So, go read something Ray Bradbury wrote, in remembrance of one of the greats. And spread the word...he may be gone, but is work is still here and it is still wonderful.

Voting day...if you were lucky

So, I went to vote this morning, since it was Primary Day here in California.



I was at my polling place by a quarter after seven, walked in, announced my name like you're supposed to do...and was told that the roster wasn't there, that it had never been mailed to the precinct inspector (that's the person in charge of the polling place, a thankless job if there ever was one...ask me how I know). They told me that I could either vote a provisional ballot, go downtown to the elections department and vote there, or come back later.

Going downtown was out of the question. There are no parking places downtown that you don't have to pay for and, anyway, I was on my way to the job search seminar I'm taking part in this week and I would not have had time to go downtown, vote, and get back to my seminar on time. So, I said I would come back later, wished the poll workers well, and went home and had breakfast before I had to be at the seminar.

None of this made me happy. Well, finding that I had time for breakfast after all made me happy, but that's about it. There is no good reason I can think of for the roster not have been mailed to the inspector. Yeah, there are reasons - incompetence downtown, too few workers downtown in this era of budget cuts to get everything done that needed to be done before the election, the US mail losing the envelope with the roster and street indexes in it - but these are not good reasons. Incompetence is never a good reason. I know that budgets are tight, but an election is an important thing, and other things need to go by the wayside before getting necessary voting materials to the polling places on time gets dropped from the list of priorities. And, well, if he post office can lose a large, thick manila envelope containing official government documents, they really need to look at their efficiency.

There is just no excuse for something like this happening. I worked on precinct boards for years, often as the inspector, and while the rosters occasionally got to me just the day before the election, they were always there before Election Day. And even if the package did not arrive on the day before the election, the inspector should have been instructed to call downtown, and someone should have been waiting at the polling place when the workers arrived at 6 a.m. with a copy of the roster so that the all the materials would be in place when the polls opened at 7 a.m. Even if the registrar of voters had to deliver it herself.

Well, I went back to vote after I got out of my seminar at 4 p.m., and the roster was there. It had, according to one of the precinct workers, arrived shortly after I left the polling place in the morning. This is good. It isn't good enough. And this wasn't the poll workers' fault. They were nothing but polite and apologetic, both when I was there this morning and when I went back in to vote in the afternoon. In fact, when I was leaving after finally getting to vote, the Precinct Inspector thanked me for being so patient and understanding with them this morning. Apparently, not everyone was so understanding. I just told her that I'd been on the receiving end of too many irate voters during the years I worked at elections to inflict that on someone else.

And speaking of working on the election...I had applied to do so, but no one ever got back to me about it. I tried going downtown a couple of times to find out why I had not been contacted but, again, there was no parking to be had and I never got to talk to them about it. When I was talking to one of the workers at the polling place this morning, he said the same thing happened to him, and that he was only working because he aggressively pursued them about it. Then, this afternoon, he told me that I should probably go talk to them about it because, during the course of the day, eight or ten other people who had come in to vote reported that they had also applied but were never contacted. This seems very odd when the election department is always complaining that they never have enough precinct workers on election days. This must have been especially true if the elections department did as they claim and opened twice as many polling places throughout the county as they had in the last election.

I will be pursuing this issue with them. I needed the work.

So, that was my Election Day. If you live in a place that had a primary today, how did your Election Day go?

It isn't Music Sunday...just an apology, an explanation, and one of my favorite songs...

Yes. I know. I missed Music Sunday this week.

All I can do is apologize and beg forgiveness. It was a crowded weekend, even though I was home the whole time. Saturday, after sleeping in a bit (hey, I have to indulge myself once in awhile), I spent time working on making award cords for my SCA Barony. Anniversary is coming up soon, and I need to have those finished by then. I also spent time...gasp...sewing. Nothing fancy, since I don't really sew. But, I'm making a quilt, so I spent a couple of hours sewing three-inch by three-inch squares together. I'm just pleased that I didn't break the machine, a real accomplishment considering the fact that sewing and I don't get along and that goes double (maybe triple) for sewing on a machine. I'm not proud of this fact, but truth is truth.

I also watched a movie, since I had the opportunity. It was The Lincoln Lawyer, based on a Michael Connelly novel and starring Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei, Ryan Phillipe, and William H. Macy. I'm not a big McConaughey fan, to be honest, but this was a good movie that stayed, as far as I can remember (I read the novel a couple of years ago), pretty close to the source material. There's a great twist at the end (no, I'm not telling), and McConaughey was better in this than anything else I've seen him in.

Then, on Sunday, I made the mistake of sitting down and starting to read a novel, The Blackbird Papers (Doubleday, 2004; 326 pages), by Ian Smith. I figured it was safe to dip into it because it was an author I haven't read before, and it usually takes me time to warm up to new mystery writers. But, I got sucked in almost immediately and spent most of the day reading, in between washing clothes and dishes and worrying about the job-search seminar I started today. Not really something to worry about, I know, but I always worry about going into new and unfamiliar situations. So, when I sat down to attempt to write the Music Sunday post, nothing I would have been comfortable posting got written. This is not to say that nothing got written...just nothing I considered usable.

So, by way of apology, I'll leave this...(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, by Otis Redding...here for you, because I love this song.

Book Review: "The Calling", by Catherine Whitney

Every once in awhile, when I'm at the library, a book catches my eye for some reason as I'm walking down an aisle looking for something else. I'll pick it up for no other reason than I take noticing it as a sign that I should read it. I've found some really good books that way, books that I wouldn't have read otherwise.

That's the case with The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1999; 250 pages), by Catherine Whitney. I was walking down the aisle between aisles of books, on my way out of the library on Thursday, when the title of the book caught my eye. I backed up, pulled it off the shelf, read the flyleaf, and put in in the pile of books I was taking home.

It might seem that this book is an odd choice for me to be interested in reading. I'm not Catholic, and never have been. I'm not really a religious person. However, when I was studying anthropology at university, my concentration was in the anthropology of religion. Additionally, I've always been fascinated by the question of why certain people choose to devote their entire lives to religion in a formal sense...those who believe they have a calling, whether it be as a priest or a nun or other Christian clergy, or as a religious professional in any religion. So, a book like this is really right up my alley.

Turned out, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Yes, it explores the question of how some of the nuns in the teaching and nursing order that Ms. Whitney studied - it was the order that had educated her as a high school student - came to their callings, and how some of them felt that calling even after they left the order. But it also looks at the concept of the calling in a wider sense, in the sense that people often feel called to do the thing that they do, not only to make a living but to feel fulfilled in their lives. The gist of it, I think, is that one's calling is the thing one feels that they must do.

I was left with the impression that doing the research for and writing the book had left Ms. Whitney, who left her church and her faith behind after high school, and after a short flirtation with joining the order herself, with a sense of closure regarding her relationship with the nuns who had taught her. She notes that, when she spent some time with the sisters in the order, some of whom had been her teachers so many years before, they always referred to her as "one of our girls", and that this had left her with a feeling that she really had always been a part of the order, even though she had spent so many years feeling estranged from her high school experience and her religion.

The best part of the book, however, for my money, are the portraits Ms. Whitney draws of some of the women who were members of the order, and who remained, in many ways, members of the order even after leaving, as much members as the women who chose to stay when so many were choosing to change paths for many different reasons. Ms. Whitney does the valuable service of showing that these women, far from being the stereotype of women who became nuns because they were unmarriageable, or running away from the world, are in most cases, strong, intelligent, competent, vibrant women who chose the life they did as a positive step rather than as a "settling" for what was left for them.

Music Sunday: A Few Favorites...

No deep analysis today for Music Sunday. No theme. Just a few things I feel like sharing, songs and performances that I particularly like.

First, here's a live version of Summertime, by Janis Joplin, from 1969:



Also, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris with their cover of Love Hurts. I think this is the definitive version of this song.



And, finally, The Who, live, from 1975, Behind Blue Eyes (plus bonus Keith Moon):

Research and headaches and thinking too much, oh, my!

So, this is me, complaining.

I'm on the third day of a headache - migraine, sinus, or a combination of the two. Makes it really difficult to get anything accomplished.

Oh, I've gotten a few things done. Wrote some on the novel I've been working on, the one I started for NaNoWriMo last November, that hit a block when I started working on my non-fiction project. It will be interesting to go back and read what I've written the past couple of days and see if it makes any sense when I don't have a headache.

So, that project is going now, but the non-fiction work is still in the water, so to speak, because I've hit a block there. That mostly has to do with ongoing research (I tend to research as I'm writing, a section at a time, rather than doing all the research and all the writing, separately) issues. The local public library system here doesn't seem to have the sciences as a priority, and it is difficult to find up-to-date sources. In something like history, having access to up-to-the-minute work in the field is good but not necessarily imperative. Of course, you want to make sure that there haven't been any recent discoveries of primary documents or anything, but history, by its very nature, doesn't change that much in the retelling, unless you're working in relatively recent times. The bigger problem in history is watching out for sources that claim to be authoritative but are actually revisionist.

In the sciences though, and especially in paleoanthropology, which is what I'm researching currently, new discoveries are made frequently - at least, there have been several discoveries, or, at least, announcements of discoveries, that have the potential to rewrite what we know about human evolution in the past year or two - and if the writer is not aware of them, he or she can look like an idiot when the book comes out. There are periodicals, of course, the science journals where the official announcements and descriptions of new fossils are made, and my library system has a pretty good online source for some of those journals that I can use; otherwise, the online presences of most of the top journals make it prohibitively expensive to do research. You can either subscribe to the online journal for hundreds of dollars per year or you can purchase access to individual articles - sometimes at $20 to $30 or more per article. There is no way I can afford that.

But, books that are up-to-date in the field are rare in the local library system. And, for some reason, they are also rare in the library at the local state university. Added to that is the fact that if I use their resources, I have to use them there. Oh, they have a "community borrower" card for non-students, but that costs, last time I checked, $100 per year, and then you can only check out two or three books at a time. While I understand that students should have first access to the books there, two or three is a ridiculously low maximum. At the private university I attended for my upper division work on my BA, the community borrower card costs something like $25 per year, and the non-students is allowed to check out something like 25 books at a time, despite the fact that it is a much, much smaller library. Unfortunately, their collection of books on paleoanthropology is very small. Now, if I were researching something in history, or in theology or biblical studies, I'd have access to more than enough research materials there.

But a lack of research materials is not the only problem I'm running into presently regarding my non-fiction writing project.

There is, in addition, my blessing/curse of an oversize dose of curiosity and my belief in the principle, stated by John Muir among others, that everything in the universe is attached to everything else. It goes something like this with me, on this project:

I'm writing about archaeology and physical anthropology (hence the current focus on human evolution), and so I'm thinking about beginnings a lot. Part of what archaeology looks at is physical evidence for the beginnings of civilization, and before that, the beginnings of agriculture, and even before that the beginnings of art and other symbolic thought that mark the beginnings of behavioral modernity. But thinking about the beginnings of behavioral modernity in turn leads, at least for me, into thinking about the beginnings of humans. Which leads to thinking about the beginnings of mammals, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of animals, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of life, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of the earth...the solar system...galaxies...so that, pretty soon, I'm wanting to go find things to read about the beginnings of the universe. The questions that topic raises can be all kinds of frustrating, not least because I don't have the mathematics and physics to really understand most of the work on the subject.

What is more immediately frustrating to me is that I've been being very good about staying focused on the topics directly related to the book I'm writing. A long as I've got work to do on it, sources that I can use for research, I've been very good at staying on task, researching a section and then writing it, then starting the cycle over again for the next section. But now that I've got a temporary break due to inadequate sources, my mind is wanting me to go seriously off the reservation and start looking into some of the questions that I have about other kinds of beginnings than just the ones that archaeology and physical anthropology are so key in studying.

I'll be fine when I can get back on track with research sources. I know I will. It's this down time that is driving me crazy.

That, and this damn headache, which is better today - else I wouldn't have had the concentration to write this blog post - but still needs to go completely away.

Eclipse, Part Two...

Most people don't look up at the sky on a regular basis. A lot of people nearly never take time out of their busy days and nights to ever look up and see what's going on in the universe around them.

There's nothing like an eclipse to change that, although even in the midst of yesterday's annular eclipse, I saw people rushing around at the height of the Moon's journey between Earth and the Sun, apparently not paying attention to the wonder in the sky above them. Some of them seemed not to notice the odd cast to the light and the extraordinary blue tint that the sky had taken on.

I have to say that I honestly don't understand how they could just go on with their normal, everyday activities with what was going on above their heads. Even here, not in the path of the most extensive coverage of the Sun's disk by the moon, it was clear that there was something extraordinary going on. I've seen solar eclipses before, but I've never experienced one that so obviously diminished the amount of sunlight that usually makes it to Earth on a clear spring afternoon. You just couldn't not notice if you were anywhere where you could see outside, not here where I am.

And if you weren't in the path of the eclipse, let me just say, I'm sorry. It was spectacular.

Actually, aside from being in a windowless room, it would have been difficult for anyone here where I live to notice even if they were inside. I had been watching the eclipse off and on from the beginning, going outside every half hour or so to check the progress of the moon making its way across the sun with my home-made pinhole camera, but I was inside writing, when I glanced out the window above my desk because it had grown noticeably darker in the room as the height of the event approached.

Of course, I went outside to take a look. With the exception of one man across the street, none of the neighbors were even outside. The twelve-year-old in me wanted to go knocking on doors, to tell people to get outside and see the wonderful show the Sun and the Moon were putting on in the sky. I didn't do that. I've been made fun of before for looking up rather than down an my feet. But some part of me still thinks I should have.

It's not like what is above our heads is some faraway place that has nothing to do with us. The Sun warms our world so that life can exist here, and it makes it possible for plants to make their food to live, to become what feeds us, directly when we eat fruits and vegetables and indirectly when we eat meat that has in turn fed on plants. But those aren't the only connections we have to the stars.

In a very real sense, we come from the stars. Every bit of us, every molecule, every element that our bodies are built from, started out inside a star. When Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang that line in "Woodstock", "We are stardust...", they weren't making it up. We really are part of the stars. Not the ones we can see in the sky at night now, if we are lucky enough to be in a dark enough location to see the night sky without the competing lights here on Earth. Instead, we are the product of stars that have already lived and died and exploded, sending the elements created in them as they went supernova and spread those elements out into the universe where they could create planets and plants and people and, well, pretty much everything else in the cosmos.

This is my challenge to you. Wherever you are, take ten minutes to step outside tonight and look up. If you are in a city, try to find a place where the lights in the sky aren't overpowered by the lights on your block, so that you will be able to see as many stars as possible. But, even if you can't find a place with low light levels, just go outside and look up. There are stars up there, and galaxies. And planets, not just here in our solar system, but out there orbiting other stars. At last count, nearly 800 planets have been detected outside our solar system. Even if few of those planets so far discovered are not likely to have life on them, who knows how many might be out there that could have, might have, do have some kind of life. It could be "life as we know it" or it could be life of entirely different kinds. It could be microscopic life, or it could be intelligent life. But none of that matters. What is important is that they're there, part of the grand whole that we call the visible universe.

And if that isn't something to stir the imagination, and the soul, I don't know what is.

Music Sunday - Eclipse Edition

Happy Music Sunday!

Because there is an eclipse of the sun today, I thought I'd just leave you some sunshiny music, so I can go outside and monitor the eclipse when it starts here, at about 2:30 p.m. local time. We won't get the full effect; this part of California is a bit outside the path for that. But, we should get a pretty cool view, anyway.

Here's George Harrison and a few friends, with Here Comes The Sun. An obvious choice.



And John Denver, all by himself, singing Sunshine On My Shoulders.



And then there's Cream's Sunshine Of Your Love



In case you're wondering what all the hoopla about the eclipse is about, here is a little primer from NASA.



And, finally, because this is an annular eclipse, known as a "ring of fire" eclipse, I'll leave this last song for today with you.



That was Johnny Cash, singing "Ring of Fire" on the Grand Ole Opry in 1968.

Music Sunday - Censorship Editon

I suppose that music censorship really started to be a "thing", in that it came to the attention of many people here in the United States, during the 1985 Senate hearing regarding what was labeled "porn rock" after nearly 20 record companies agreed to put labels warning of "Explicit Content" on some records. The agreement by record companies to do this came after a group called the Parents Music Resource Center put pressure on them to do so. And this is probably the thing that comes to mind most often when record or music censorship is brought up...music that has sexual content or so-called obscene words, or that has what censors consider to be references to drug use, all of which some parents might object to their children listening to.

The hearings were interesting, including testimony from Frank Zappa, who called the stickers, and the PMRC campaign "nonsense", and an appearance by John Denver, whom the PMRC expected to support their cause. Instead Denver spoke out against censorship and what he called misinterpretation of songs, including his own "Rocky Mountain High."

This sort of censorship has been going on much longer than since 1985, however. In the 1960s, the popular Sunday night variety show staple, The Ed Sullivan Show, attempted to censor performances by, among others, The Rolling Stones and The Doors for respectively, sexual and drug references, with varying success. Mick Jagger altered the words of "Let's Spend the Night Together" to "let's spend some time together", as requested, but he obviously rolled his eyes at the camera as he did so.



In the case of The Doors' performance of "Light My Fire", Jim Morrison was asked to change the lyric, "girl, we couldn't get much higher" to "girl, we couldn't get much better". During the performance, Morrison sang the lyric as originally written. After the show, the band was told that they wouldn't ever be invited onto the show again, and they weren't, but it didn't seem to bother Morrison or the band very much. They'd already done the show and apparently were not interested in repeating the experience. Both of these incidents took place in 1967.

More interesting to me are the songs that have been censored, or that there have been attempts to censor, on radio or television, based on lyrical content that doesn't consist of "dirty" words. One of my favorites in this category is "Lola", by The Kinks, which was released in 1970. The BBC would not broadcast the song, not because the subject matter of the song included a transvestite, but because the lyric named a product, Coca Cola. Ray Davies had to go back into the studio and replace "Coca Cola" with "cherry cola" before the BBC would play the song on the air. I hear both versions on the radio here in the US, and was puzzled that there were two versions until I read this story a few years ago when I was writing a paper for a college class on music censorship.

Politics have also resulted in music censorship. "Eve of Destruction", most notably recorded by Barry McGuire in 1965, was banned on some US radio stations for its lyrics critical of, among other things, the draft, the war in Vietnam, and the existence and use of nuclear weapons. Earlier, in 1963 and again on The Ed Sullivan Show, a scheduled appearance by Bob Dylan never took place because the song he wanted to sing, "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", was deemed too politically sensitive to sing. Dylan walked off the show rather than agree to the censorship.



This clip of "Eve of Destruction", from the time tht the song was the #1 hit in the US, is a little strange. I'm not sure what the producers of the show thought the dancers would add to it. At least, it was allowed on the airwaves, which was more than some radio stations would allow at the time.

I could go on and on in detailing incidents in which interest groups or networks or governments themselves have attempted to restrict or completely stop the playing of some music over the airwaves. The BBC appears to have an especially lengthy record of this sort of activity. It once even banned an instrumental piece of music, the theme to the Frank Sinatra film, "The Man With the Golden Arm", in 1956, because it was connected to a film that had drug use as a theme. Doesn't make any sense to me, but then again, most censorship doesn't make much sense to me.

Another book review...of a much better book

This is much, much better.

After taking more than a week to drag myself through the last book I read which, if you saw the review I posted here I didn't like that much, it took me just two days to read Dead Time (Dutton, 2008; 400 pages), by Stephen White.

I hadn't read anything by Mr. White in awhile, and after this installment in the story of Dr. Alan Gregory and his family and friends, I suspect I'm going to be catching up on the volumes that I've missed in the past few years, while my reading attention was elsewhere. Simply, I had forgotten how good a writer Mr. White is, how he can spin an engrossing story, and how he is able to write realistic, multi-dimensional characters that are completely believable. He even makes the info-dump that most novels have to have, to catch the characters (as well as the reader) up on events, entertaining and readable.

For those of you not familiar with this series, Dr. Alan Gregory is a psychologist living in Boulder,, Colorado and who has an unfortunate (well, fortunate for the reader) habit of getting caught up in murder and mayhem. In this case Meredith, his ex-wife, calls on him to find the woman who is carrying her child as a surrogate when the woman disappears under mysterious circumstances. Those circumstances end up having to do with the disappearance of another young woman at the Grand Canyon some years before, in event that involved both the surrogate and Meredith's fiancee, Eric.

The story, this time, opens out from Boulder and stretches to New York City and Los Angeles, where Dr. Gregory manages to get himself in over his head on more than one front. I really hesitate to say anything more about the story, because I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't yet read it. I will say that there are family complications along the way for the doctor, in the form of a new adopted son and as his current wife, Lauren, sets out for Holland to find the child she had given up for adoption before she knew the doctor.

That is one of the things I appreciate about Mr. White's books. He is able to juggle the main plot and side plots in a way that makes them seem like one whole, rather than a story with an "Oh, by the way" or two cobbled on in order to make the world creates for the reader more like real life, where there are usually five different, and mostly unrelated, things going on at the same time. This ability makes his books more than just a straight line from one event in the story to the next, again like real life. As there are few straight lines in nature, there are very few in real life.

And that was one of the problems with Natural Selection, the previous novel I read and reviewed. It was one straight line, jumping from one event to the next, with very little respite, and very little believability. And, by the way, info-dumps that were excruciating to read. I didn't realize how little believability, in fact, until I had the reading, so close in time, of Dead Time to compare it to.

I like the books I read to make me feel like I have fallen into the world the author has invented for the book, whether it is the "real" world or a close facsimile thereof, or a completely invented world. And I like to feel like I have been on a journey, rather than on a sprint to the finish line.

Dead Time is a good book, and a an excellent reading experience. I wish I could find more novels with so much texture to them.

I read it, but I didn't necessarily love it...

I grumbled all the way through, but I finally finished reading Natural Selection (Hyperion, 2006), by Dave Freedman, after posting recently about how I wasn't sure I really wanted to finish it.

I think reading it probably wasn't a waste of time, since I believe I learned some things about how not to write a novel as I read along. I did nearly throw it across the room in the last 50 or 100 pages, when there were some things said or implied about evolution were unclear and didn't seem to jibe with what I've learned about how evolution works. Or, maybe the author just left things out that would have made that part of the story make more sense. There was also the fact that Mr. Freedman included one of those "I never mentioned it but..." scenes as he was wrapping up the story. I hate it when a writer does that, especially when it contradicts things that were established earlier in the story.

That said, what was going on within the story managed, in the end, to keep me turning the pages, and I ended up reading much later into the night last night than I should have done to finish the book. It was a near thing the whole time, but my need to know what happened outweighed the things I found frustrating and irritating about the book and about Mr. Freedman's writing.

I never did really warm up to any of the characters. I didn't like how Mr. Freedman handled the chapters and parts of chapters that were written from the creature's point of view. I don't know that I can say I liked the book as a whole.

On the positive side, that makes fourteen books I've read so far this year, and takes my total pages read (aside from reading for research for my current writing project when I haven't read a whole book through) this year so far to 5788 pages. With not even half the year over, I'm more than halfway to my pages read goal (10,000 pages) even though I'm still six books shy of the half-way mark to my goal of 40 books read this year, up from the 31 books I read last year. I know I should probably be reading at least a book a week, but with writing and, now, job-hunting, my reading time is more limited than I would like at the moment.

You have to ask the right questions...

Hat tip to Neil de Grasse Tyson for tweeting this video.

The context of the video is the vote today in North Carolina to decide the fate of Amendment One, the implications of which go far beyond just which personal relationships will be recognized by the government there and which will not. This message is applicable far beyond that, however; it is relevant socially, historically and, most especially for us in the United States, constitutionally.

So, I'll shut up and let the message speak for itself.

Music Sunday - Early Beatles edition

Today is Music Sunday. I was going to write a nice post about guilty pleasures...those songs people like in their heart of hearts, but won't admit to liking because the songs or the artists are not "cool enough". I've got them, you've got them...everybody's got them.

I'll admit to some of mine. Not all of them, but some of them. But that will have to wait for another day. Plans change, and things come up, and it's cleaning day around here. And since I was up until 4 am, there will probably be a nap in there somewhere, and fairly soon.

Never fear, however, there will still be Music Sunday.

One of the things I did while I couldn't sleep last night, was that I watched Help, the Beatles second film. It's a fun movie. Silly, but good silly, and with lots of good music. It isn't the classic that A Hard Day's NIght is, but then again, few movies are. I love A Hard Day's Night, while I merely like Help a whole lot.

So, what I'm going to do is leave the title song of Help here for you to enjoy, along with a little Beatle silliness. I'm not sure where this performance is from, but it just goes to show the sort of thing that pop artists had to put up with in the Sixties. Even the Beatles.



And then, I found this gem, part of an appearance by The Beatles on the BBC on December 7, 1963, not long before they came to the United States for the first time. Here you can see how advanced Beatlemania had become even before it spread here to the States.



By next week, I hope, the insomnia will be gone, and we can get down to discussing those guilty pleasures that music provides.

Choices, choices, choices...

This is my problem...and a decidedly first-world problem it is, of no consequence whatsoever in the universal scheme of things. But it is a problem for me, and it's bothering me for some reason.

I'm reading a novel, Natural Selection (Hyperion, 2006), by Dave Freedman. It's, oh, I don't know, call it science fiction, call it techno-thriller. There is a crew of scientists in search of an elusive new species of ray that is carnivorous and very, very smart. Think of them like velociraptors under the sea. Except that some of them are learning to fly, have evolved the capacity to breathe air...and they are very very hungry. At this point in the narrative (I'm 186 pages in), they've already eaten one person, a pod of dolphins (is that the correct term? A pod? Or is that just whales?) and a whole lot of seagulls.

The scientists have yet to see a live one of these creatures, but they've dissected the one dead specimen they've found, and it is all mouth, teeth and stomach...as part of their necropsy (autopsy on a non-human specimen), they pulled 56 dead but undigested gulls out of its stomach.

It's an interesting concept for a book. That's not my problem.

My problem is, I don't like any of the characters, I'm running out of patience with the chapters told from the rays' point of view. And the author, probably because this is his first novel, has a tendency to info-dump more than he really needs to.

In ordinary circumstances, I would have given this book 50 pages, 75 at the outside, and then put it down in frustration. But, I find myself wanting to see where the story goes, how the author solves the problems he's setting up for the characters, and how he solves the problem he set up for himself as a writer in seeing the story through to the end.

This, even though at least once a chapter I get an almost-overwhelming urge to throw the book against a wall.

Part of me wants to keep reading, for the reasons stated above, as well as just that I'm nearly halfway through the thing and it seems stupid to put it down now. On the other hand, well, the frustration just keeps building. And it isn't like I don't have anything else to read. My to-read pile is huge. Plus, I should be spending more time on my writing and less time reading a novel I'm pretty sure I don't even like that much.

My questions to you, dear readers, are two. First of all, should I keep reading or give it up and go on to something else? And two, do you ever run into problems like this when reading a book, where you want to put it down and not pick it back up but can't quite convince yourself to just cut your losses before it sucks any more time away from you?

Drop a comment if you have any advice, experiences or just think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill.

In which, again, I just don't understand some people...

I don't know what's in the air around here, but my allergies are kicking my butt the past two or three days. Feeling, most of the time, like someone has bashed me in the middle of the face with a baseball bat, which is how my allergies tend to manifest, has put me in a surly mood. In addition, I've had a headache that I'm not that sure is completely related to the allergies, although they are probably a contribution factor.

Consequently, in the crappy mood I've been in, I've been trying to avoid anything that will make me angry. Oh, like the news. Me cranky and angry at the same time is not a good combination.

However, surfing around the Internet, it's well nigh impossible to avoid the news entirely. And so, I've heard about the preacher in North Carolina who told the fathers in his congregation that if their sons start to act "effeminate" (his word), the fathers should punch the kids.

Excuse me? Completely aside from the question of what the Old Testament has to say about social issues in general or homosexuality (which is, of course, what the preacher was referring to) in particular, and whether the verses those who believe God does not like homosexuality really mean what they think they mean, which is a different post altogether, HOW IS ADVOCATING PUNCHING SOMEONE BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE HOW THEY ACT IN ANY WAY CHRISTLIKE?

Sorry for screaming, but really? Was this guy, who will remain nameless because I don't want to give him a name-check, even in this blog that not that many people read, saying that fathers should beat the gay, or what they perceive as the gay, out of their sons? Is this really something that Christ would have advocated, based on his reported attitudes in the New Testament? Having read the gospels, and huge portions of the rest of the New Testament, I would say that, no, this is not something Christ would have been okay with.

Now, since the video tape of this preacher saying these things has been all over the Internet and all over the other media, he has backpedaled furiously...so furiously that he's dug himself a deeper hole. His explanation/apology? He didn't mean it. It was a joke.

I suspect that all this as to do with the fact that North Carolina is about to vote on whether to define marriage as between one man and one woman. It's an issue that tends to get the religious right all riled up and saying things that they really shouldn't be saying, things that tend to get them in hot water one way or another. But, again, that's beside the point. He shouldn't have said what he did, no matter what the provocation.

So, who is going to volunteer to sit this guy down and explain to him that suggesting that fathers beat their sons because they think their sons might be behaving "effeminately" is not very funny. That it is, in fact, child abuse.

I'm on the other side of the country, so I'm not a good candidate for the job. And even if I was in shouting distance, he's probably not the sort of person who would be amenable to listening to a mere woman. Basically there's not a snowball's chance in hell that I would be able to convince him. I know there's no way he'd be able to convince me of his position, either that punching kids - for any reason - is a good idea, or that it is something to joke about.

But, hey...if you're in his neighborhood, and if you want to give convincing him that he is wrongheaded on this issue a try, please, let me know how it goes.