Monthly Archives: September 2002

Mama Makes Up Her Mind, by Bailey White

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I first started listening to NPR during the opening days of the Gulf War.
Our local NPR station, KPCC, abandoned its regular programming and had
war news on most of the time. It was like CNN, only I could listen to it
in the car. The normal programming returned over the next few days, and I
made some pleasant discoveries. Bailey White, an occasional
commentator for All Things Considered, was chief among them.

I believe the first spot I heard detailed Bailey’s discovery of how to
teach first-graders to read: maritime disaster. Teach a kid that a book
can tell him something horrible, and you’ve won the battle. And then
there was the bit about Bailey’s mama and roadkill recipes; and the story
about the Evil Bed in the guest room.

I don’t listen to NPR much any more, and I haven’t heard Bailey’s voice
in years. But I happened to open Mama Makes Up Her Mind the
yesterday (a friend returned it to us), and got hooked all over again.
It’s a book of short sketches, two or three or five or six pages long, a
form that is never completely satisfying in book form; it’s like trying
to satiate yourself on carrots and iceberg lettuce. And some of the
sketches aren’t nearly as interesting the second time around, like when
Bailey’s mama saw the flock of bicyclists from the bathtub on the back
porch.

But then there’s “Midnight Cowboy”, and “Dead on the Road”, and “The Bed”,
and “Scary Movies”, and “Memorizing Trollope”, and “Maritime Disaster”,
and “The Dance of the Chicken Feet”–oh, there’s more than enough here to
be worth the price of admission.

A Day of Rest

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Sunday is Nap Day around our house. Sleep in, have a
leisurely breakfast, go off to church, have a simple lunch and then it’s
nap time. We don’t plan it that way; it’s just that Sunday is a day of
rest and come Sunday afternoon we feel like resting. Jane and I feel
like resting, I mean; the kids often require some encouragement. That’s
become my definition of adulthood: that age when naps suddenly start to
sound like a good idea.

Today was exceptional only in that David went off to a birthday party for
his new kindergarten friend Max. Max just turned six; and apparently
when you’re six it’s no longer cool for your friends’ parents to hang
around for the party. So there was one less child needing encouragement,
and as Anne (the littlest) had fallen asleep right after church I took
James off on an errand. He fell asleep in the car, and after I sent him
up for a nap it was my turn. I had a blissful time until David came home
and wanted to show me the prizes he’d won at the party (a couple of small
Lego toys, including what looks like a Martian driving a swamp boat;
heaven only knows where he’d find a swamp to drive it in). Ah, well. I
knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

March Upcountry, by David Weber and John Ringo

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What happens when the Empress of a good bit of the known galaxy treats
her third son like a mushroom (e.g., keeps him in the dark and, well, you
get the idea) from his childhood until he grows to adulthood because he
resembles his treacherous father a little too much? You get Prince Roger
MacClintock, good-looking, bored, possibly disloyal, unskilled (except at
a few things he genuinely likes) because he’s never been trusted to do
anything important.

You get Prince Roger MacClintock, possible tool of the Empress’s enemies.
You get Prince Roger MacClintock, obnoxious, ill-tempered, and petulant,
the burden of the Bronze Battalion of the Empress’ Own Regiment. They’ll
keep him alive, die for him if necessary, but that doesn’t mean they need
to respect hiim–and they don’t.

And then the ship that’s taking Prince Roger and his bodyguard to show
the flag on a remote planet is sabotaged. Prince and bodyguard have no
choice but to land on Marduk, an extremely unpleasant place with only one
starport where they can find a ship back home. And because that starport
has just been taken by the forces of the neighboring star empire, they
have to land in secret halfway around the planet or risk getting blown
out of the sky.

This is a war novel, of the sort for which both David Weber
and John Ringo are already known; it’s also a coming-of-age
novel. Bravo Company is going
to have to do considerable fighting to get the Prince safely home; but
the Prince is going to have to pull his weight and earn the respect of
his troops. Roger’s growth through the novel adds some needed depth to
what would otherwise be a fairly shallow (if exciting) science fiction
adventure.

I feel kind of like Deb English felt last month: I’m not at all sure that
this is a good book, but gosh I had fun reading it.

March Upcountry takes Roger and the gang half the way home;
the story is continued in March to the Sea, which is now out
in hardback (I think). I’ll wait for the paperback, but I’ll definitely
buy it when it comes out.

Oh, and my thanks go to my brother Chuck, who passed this one along
to me.

Soccer

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Today was David’s fourth soccer game of his first AYSO season, and
his team, the Blue Tigers, scored two goals against the Mighty Dragons.
These were, I might add, only the second and third goal the Blue Tigers
have ever scored, and the only goals of the game. That doesn’t mean that
the Blue Tigers won–they don’t officially keep score in the
five-year-old league–but still, there was great rejoicing. We won’t
talk about the Mighty Dragon’s goalie or the fact that David was in a
brown study for most of the game.

It was a surprisingly vicious game, the most violent I’ve seen to date.
I don’t know who started it, but there were kids falling over each other
all over the field. In some cases it was benign–one kid falls, and the
next kid, who’s really nowhere near him, falls down in sympathy–and in
some cases it was accidental, like when one kid went to kick the
ball just as the goalie fell on it, and ended up doing a header over the
goalie’s back. But there was a lot of pushing and shoving going on as
well.

David, I’m proud to say, had no part in the pushing and shoving…but
given his general air of detachment during much of the game, that’s not
particularly noteworthy.

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry, by Harry Kemelman

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I had to come up for a breath of air after reading Stowe so I searched
around on the bookshelf for a likely looking mystery. The David Small
“Rabbi” series have been around for quite a while and, my friend the
local bookstore owner had recommended them to me a while back so I
thought, what the hey, I’ll give this one a try. Rabbi and detective are
two words I normally don’t associate in the same thought so if detectives
have a “gimmick” and they usually do, then this sounded at least unique.

Rabbi Small is a young rabbinical scholar serving as Rabbi to a small
congregation in Barnard Crossings, a small town in Massachusetts. The
synagogue is fairly new and serves Orthodox, Reform and Conservative
believers, giving Rabbi Small a thin line to tread when dealing with the
politics of the congregation. On the eve of Yom Kippur, a man is found
dead in his garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. His wife, a Gentile,
wants him buried in the Jewish cemetery with Jewish rights since he had
been raised a Jew. The police have ruled it accidental death due to the
alcohol content of his blood, but the insurance company comes sniffing
around making noises about suicide and the suicide clause in his policy.
And if he had killed himself, his burial in the Jewish cemetery would
make the rest of the land “unclean” which really ticks off an elderly
Orthodox Jew who’s wife is buried there and who is also about to donate a
pile of money for a new chapel addition to the synagogue. It gets much
more convoluted and complex from there but the upshot is that Rabbi Small
must figure out if it was suicide, accidental death or murder. And he
uses Talmudic logic to work his way thru the puzzle.

I whipped right thru this one. The reading is easy and the story moves
along fast enough to keep the pages turning without losing any detail in
the process. I found the details about the Jewish faith and customs to be
interesting as well and was amused to find that Synagogue politics and
Church politics, as depicted by Trollope, are not all that different. I
may have to look for more of these to keep on hand when I need a good,
light book.

Monsters, Inc.

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I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was watching
Monsters, Inc. with Jane instead. It was delightful the first
time I saw it, by myself last December, and it was delightful the second
time I saw it, with my boy David, also last December, and it was
delightful this time on DVD, even if the screen was too small.

The more I consider how much time George Lucas has spent on digital graphics
in the last two Star Wars movies, and to such little effect, the more
impressed I am with Pixar. Their technology is just as cutting edge,
and yet they never forget that the story comes first. And they
consistently do an outstanding job.

An Exchange of Hostages, by Susan R. Matthews

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This is the story of a young nobleman named Andrej Koscuisko. He’s a member
of the nobility on one of the planets of a star empire called the
Jurisdiction. As the name implies, power in the Jurisdiction is held by
the judiciary rather than by an executive or legislative body. The
Bench’s decisions are enforced by the Fleet. Trial for criminal
wrong-doing is by inquisition, accompanied by torture; the point of the
torture is twofold, to elicit confessions and to deter other criminals.
As a result, the Jurisdiction is always in need of skilled inquisitors.

Due to the practical difficulties involved in using torture as a way of
gathering information, it’s required that all inquisitors have medical
training. It so happens that our hero recently graduated first in his
class from the best medical school in the Jurisdiction. His father (for
reasons that are never explained) has insisted that he go to Fleet
Medical Orientation Station, there to learn how to be an
inquisitor/torturer. The book covers the time he spends in training.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It kept me reading, and there are
many interesting, well-drawn characters; Andrej’s personal development
through the course of the book is particularly well described.

But…. there are many extremely unpleasant scenes. This is not a book
for the squeamish. Only my concern for the characters kept me reading.

But…. The folks in charge of the Orientation Station are portrayed as
being kind, thorough, decent men and women who truly care about their
charges, low and high…and yet they have dedicated their lives to
training torturers. Why?

But…. after chapters of extremely painful material, the book just kind
of ends. There’s no satisfactory resolution; young Andrej simply goes
off to be a torturer.

In short, I fail to see the point of this book. It was undeniably
interesting, but after putting up with all the pain I had hoped for a
better payoff. Matthews is an author to watch, but I can’t recommend
this particular book. Unless, that is, you like to read detailed
descriptions of blood and gore.

Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein

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This is the other early Heinlein novel I picked up for this trip. It’s
one of Heinlein’s so-called “juveniles”, and I can barely remember having
tried to read it when I was eleven or twelve. The hero is a school kid
named Jimmy Marlowe; he gets treated very badly by the
school’s headmaster, and I found it so unpleasant that I put the book
down and never picked it back up again.

The book is both better plotted and less inclined to lecture than
Beyond This Horizon, which was written seven years earlier;
still, I found it less satisfying. I don’t think it’s just because it’s
a juvenile, either, as many of Heinlein’s juveniles are first rate.
Perhaps the editor’s hand was a little heavier on this one.

All-in-all, I found it interesting mostly as a precursor to
Stranger in a Strange Land. I don’t believe that it’s set in
precisely the same universe, but the Martians we see only from afar in
Stranger in a Strange Land are clearly very much like the ones
we meet up close in Red Planet. It was interesting to get a
closer look at them.

The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire, by Anthony Trollope

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I tend to enjoy long series of novels with complex plots and varied
characters.
Dorothy
Dunnett and Sharon K. Penman’s historical series are
two examples. But 19th century British literature is also full of long,
complex books that can totally wrap themselves around my imagination and
allow me to live in the story while it lasts. This novel is roughly 900
pages long. It ties together the previous novels in the series so tightly
that if you haven’t read them you will miss much of the richness of the
story and the subtle references made to the past. It’s long and involved
and very Victorian.

With that said, I barely could put it down long enough to eat or get some
sleep. The essential storyline revolves around Rev. Josiah Crawley’s
indictment on theft charges for allegedly stealing a check and using it
to pay off bills. Crawley is a perpetual curate in a Hogglestock, a small
village on the periphery of Barsetshire. He and his wife and kids are
near starvation and crushed under the shame of poverty–shame that is
made much, much worse by the fact that he was raised a gentleman and is
highly educated. But he has a fatal flaw. His gentleman’s pride makes him
refuse any help and his personality is so prickly with it that he puts
off anyone wanting to help him. He even refuses a lawyer for the trial
since he doesnÂ’t have the cash to pay for one and won’t take the charity
of his friends. And he has become depressed to the point of being nearly
psychotic.

That’s the skeleton that Trollope fleshes out with the love story of
Grace Crawley and Henry Grantly, the adventures of Conroy Dalrymple and
Clara Van Siever, the broken romance of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames and
the marital relationships of Archdeacon Grantly and his wife and Bishop
Proudie and his wife. Mrs. Proudie is absolutely the best female
character I have read in a long time. She’s an interfering, prideful,
domineering, sneaky woman who so totally overwhelms her husband that she,
in fact, is the real Bishop of Barsetshire and he only a figurehead.
Everyone, including her husband, hates her with a passion. I did too. Her
fate in the end is wonderfully apt. Trollope puts some hysterically funny
episodes in this novel, including a scene where Johnny Eames, a minor
character, has to escape the clutches of an admiring woman on the make
for a husband by crawling out a window because her mother has locked him
in. But when Trollope made Mrs. Proudie, he pulled out all the stops.