Category: Life

Great Author Discovered

There are only a few authors that I really, really like. Cormac McCarthy, Kent Haruf, William Gay, Charles Frazier (who seems to be a one and done guy), maybe a few more.

Sadly (more for him than me, I guess), my favorite writer, Larry Brown, died recently. Since the guys I like write something like one book every 5 years, I need to find more good writers to fill my reading needs. Fortunately, I found a new one.

I just finished An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg, and it was utterly excellent. If his other novel, which I have ordered from Amazon, is as good as this one, he may become my favorite writer. His characters are deep and believable. His dialog is perfect. I really like this book and have high hopes for more good books from him.

I learned after reading this book that it has been made into a movie by Robert Redford, which would have concerned me had I known that before I read the book because of the “chick book” implications. I can’t speak for the movie, but the book is in the Kent Haruf, William Gay mold- only maybe a little better.

When I was reading the book, I did think about who should play the characters in a movie (although I didn’t know about the movie at the time). Morgan Freeman is the only choice for Mitch, and he plays him in the movie. Redford is a horrible choice for Einar- Einar is older and much tougher. Jennifer Lopez as Jean also strikes me as a “get fannies in the seats” choice. Elizabeth Shue would be better. The girl who plays Griff is new, but she better be good and cool, because the character she plays is both.

It’s a rare treat to find a good new author. I hope the movie does the book justice, but based on the cast, I bet it doesn’t (other than Morgan Freeman).

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That Duke Thing Again

So Scoble posts about some gathering at the Apple Store in Seattle where Buzz Bruggeman sees some other Duke guy wearing his Duke gear and they start talking about Duke this and Duke that (but not, I assure you, about Duke’s crappy football team). Scoble says it proves his theory that guys who go to the “good schools” get all the breaks.

I comment on Scoble’s page that the Duke thing has more to do with the hoops program than the academic program. There are a lot of great schools out there, but you don’t see many people running around in Columbia hats.

Shortly thereafter I get a good natured email from Buzz telling me, no doubt correctly, that he never sees anybody wearing a Wake Forest (my alma mater) hat. And that’s the problem. Marketing is, believe it or not Mr. Million Dollar a Year school president, important for schools just like everybody else, and there is no better marketing than a great sports program. And if you can’t have a great sports program (e.g., Stanford) then at least have one great sport (the sweet smell of Duke basketball more than masks the stench of its bottom of the conference football team). I guarantee you that Duke has received more meaningful press as a result of its hundred or so ACC and NCAA basketball championships that is has all of its Rhodes Scholars and other academic notables combined.

Every televised game (which means every game, since Duke owns the networks during hoops season the way Notre Dame does during football season) you get to hear about what a great school it is (and that’s true- it is a great school, but there are lots of those). You also get to see that stupid Coach K/Amex commercial about 500 times, but I digress. The thing is that young kids (even the future Duke students still living up in New Jersey) don’t care about average SAT scores or Rhodes Scholars. Even if they do care, that information isn’t on ESPN every time you turn on the TV, like the Duke basketball team is.

All of these schools (Wake Forest definitely included) who pretend to be showing academic integrity by ignoring their crappy sports programs (my other alma mater, Vanderbilt, being another great example of this) are not only thrusting a canard at us to rationalize athletic mediocrity, they are also missing out on the kind of marketing and publicity that money can’t buy (but championships can).

So my hat’s off (like all the other hatless Wake Forest fans) to Duke for stumbling into this brilliant marketing strategy by hiring Coach K back when he was a nobody. But sorry Buzz, I still hate the Blue Devils.

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37 Years Ago

I was thinking this morning what my Dad would think if somehow he came back for a visit today.

Many things would be the same. People still drive cars, eat the same sort of food, watch a little TV (many more channels), play golf, hunt, fish, go camping and farm. Airplanes are still more or less the same. We made it to the moon, and then quit thinking about space. Some people still smoke cigarettes, but not in restaurants. Politicians still lie about each other and care more about discrediting the other side than doing anything meaningful. Tony Bennett is still alive. Johnny Cash is dead.

Many, many things would be new or different. Telephones have buttons, not a dial. Computers are everywhere and typewriters are rarely seen. Banking is done at machines on the sidewalk or over the phone. All of the good TV shows have been replaced with softcore porn. Mom died (after 30 years as a widow). My sister got a couple of graduate degrees. She got married and then divorced. I grew up and moved to Texas, where I neither farm nor sell cars, but do camp and fish. Nobody listens to Vic Damone. Vietnam is over, but we have new wars on TV, fought with technology and embedded reporters. Things cost a whole lot more than they used to.

As Townes Van Zandt once said, time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana.

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3 Things I Remember About: 1969

This is the fifth in a series.

(1) I moved from Primary School to the 4th grade at Elementary School. I was in Mrs. Laney’s class. Later in life, she let me hunt quail on her land north of my hometown. We used to play kickball at recess, and all the guys used to try to kick the ball on the roof of the school. That was sort of like hitting a baseball out of the park.

(2) I distinctly remember watching on TV as Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. I was amazed that something like that was possible. There were a few people, including more than one in my class, who thought the whole thing was staged by the government. Many years later after I moved to Houston, I became friends with Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, and was able to hear a lot of amazing stories first hand.

(3) I remember the nightly news with Walter Cronkite. He would always give a report about Vietnam- the name of some village where a battle happened, how many Americans killed and how many Americans got killed. I didn’t think all that much about it at the time, but in hindsight it seems almost surreal. I guess there’s so much instant information today that we get somehow desensitized to all of these wars we’re fighting. Back then there was one report a day- a death scorecard every night that told us who allegedly won the war that day.

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Book Review: New Cormac

I just finished No Country for Old Men, the new novel by Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite authors. It’s set in 1980 Texas, where a working man stumbles across a drug deal gone bad and makes off with a bunch of drug money, only to be relentlessly chased by a bad man named Chigurh and a Sheriff named Bell. By anyone else’s standards it’s a mighty good book, but it’s not up to the standards of McCarthy’s prior work.

I thought it was interesting, but not compelling. Yes, I caught a little of the literary and biblical references and I have read that there are a lot more. But if I wanted to do a puzzle, I’d do a puzzle. Many of his prior books contained passages in Spanish. It was fun to try to read and understand those, because they added to the authenticity of the book. Here, the puzzles just weren’t worth solving. I just read over them. I embrace the idea that the drug war is a bloody war fought by dark and anonymous forces. I liked Sheriff Bell and appreciated that he is the one of the last of a dwindling breed. But books are about the story, and the story just didn’t grab me.

Blood Meridian and the Trilogy are among the best books I’ve ever read. This one is not. It’s OK, worth reading. But not a literary force like the others.

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He Write Good

Kevin Hales is a friend of mine and one of the best writers I know. I’ve read his posts on ACCBoards.Com for years. Now he has a blog. Kevin’s one of those rare folks who can write about anything and make it intensely interesting. Witness this excerpt from his hilarious post about the neighborhood Buddhist-in-training:

You know, the putz from some American suburb who has recently discovered Buddhism and has gotten all Zenny and over-serious? The guy who doesn’t own a TV and needs to tell everyone about it?

He will find you at parties, sometimes. His name might be, I don’t know, Benjamin. He might have a goatee, or maybe just some ridiculous spot of hair on his chin. He might say, “My name is Ben. I don’t say ‘Benjamin’ anymore because people can’t spell it.” (I never understood this.) At some point, really way too soon in the conversation, he’ll say something about Buddhism. Then he’ll say, “Not Boo-dism, mind you–Boo-thism. There’s an H in there. Not many people know that.” This will mark the first time you really really should get away from him.

But you can’t. He has identified you as the guy he’s going to mentor about Eastern philosophy tonight. He mildly, but firmly, says, “Let me ask you a question. Why do you work?” If you are smart, at this point you will stab him in the neck with the nearest moderately pointy object within reach. More of us are not smart when faced with this guy, though. We are naive. What you do is fumble a bit and then say, “Well, I guess to make money.”

Bookmark his blog. You’ll be glad you did.

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Halloween

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We went to the Fenrichs’ tonight for our annual Halloween party. It was raining like cats and dogs for most of the night, but we still managed to do some trick or treating and the kids had a big time.

Raina, putting her pregnant tummy to good use, was a jack-o-lantern. Delaney was Ariel (the mermaid, not Prospero’s ghostly servant, but that would have been cool too). I was a werewolf and Cassidy was a “spooky spirit” (Delaney has Cassidy’s wig on in the photo) Rachael (Cassidy’s pal) was a groovy witch. All of the kids and most of the grown-ups were in full costume atire. We had a great time walking around the neighborhood.

It was a lot of fun.

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Halloween- Not Just Your Father’s Holiday

halloweenThe other night at dinner someone said that Halloween was primarily an American holiday. I didn’t say anything to the contrary because I wasn’t certain, but it turns out that’s not the case.

Here the Wikipedia page for Halloween. Lots of information about the origins and celebration of Halloween.

Here is a site that describes how Halloween in celebrated in other countries.

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Interesting Halloween Site

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Old Haunts is a neat web site that includes old photographs of Halloweens long past. Lots of cool stuff.

I wish someone would do a wiki or other collaborative site to compile this sort of thing. I really enjoy looking at vintage stuff about Halloween, Christmas, etc. A few years ago I even bought a couple of 60s era Sears Christmas catalogs off of eBay just to look at all the stuff I used to long for as a kid.

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