A Piñata Store & Gardenias

Texans recently looted a demolished piñata store and a woman in Boise, Idaho, was arrested for attempting to convert a Jewish acquaintance by pulling her hair and stepping on her neck, screaming that she accept Jesus. The victim had no alternative but to comply, temporarily.

In a small town north of New Delhi, a 32 year-old Indian woman described as 95 percent genetically male gave birth to twins last week, and in Hong Kong doctors reported the case of an infant diagnosed with fetus-in-fetu after discovering two siblings gestating in her abdomen.

A 1965 poem by Elizabeth Bishop…“Filling Station”

Oh, but it is dirty!

—this little filling station,

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

to a disturbing, over-all

black translucency.

Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,

oil-soaked monkey suit

that cuts him under the arms,

and several quick and saucy

and greasy sons assist him

(it’s a family filling station),

all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?

It has a cement porch

behind the pumps, and on it

a set of crushed and grease-

impregnated wickerwork;

on the wicker sofa

a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide

the only note of color—

of certain color. They lie

upon a big dim doily

draping a taboret

(part of the set), beside

a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?

Why the taboret?

Why, oh why, the doily?

(Embroidered in daisy stitch

with marguerites, I think,

and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

ESSO—SO—SO—SO

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

English Crime novelist Ruth Rendell once said, “Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

Rain for most of Tuesday night in Oak Hill. Wednesday came around dry and sunny but chilly until the afternoon. The new gardenia freshly planted on the east end of the carport is flourishing and heavy with buds the size of peanut M&Ms. This past Saturday a longtime Tokyo friend and I passed an hour wandering the aisles at the weekend flea market up the road. She wanted to buy something for the yard and found a gardenia bush she decided would be just right in a spot behind the carport. Home later, we planted it, admiring the number of buds not too far from opening. Gardenias most commonly bloom in spring but I’m not sure we’ve crossed that line yet here in central coastal Florida. Makes me think the gardenia was coaxed along by greenhouse conditions before landing in my yard. I noticed today one bud among the many just starting to show a bit of unfurling white.

Didn’t know until now that gardenias are in the Rubiaceae family, the same as a coffee plant.

K from Tokyo is now recently departed—I pause over the words ‘recently departed’ thinking it might imply death…but then I’m certain it doesn’t always have to carry that meaning. She’s back now at her life and routines in the city I continue to miss particularly. I knew it would happen; when I got home from taking K to the airport, Farina was her usual excited self but seeing only me at the door she ran to the car trying to see inside, to see if K was there. She turned in circles whining, looking back at me, then back to the car and finally barking, as if to say, "Where is K?" I think it took about an hour for her to realize her new friend had gone away. (K gave me the gardenia plant but she gave Farina a whole pumpkin pie.)

I haven’t seen my down the road neighbor, Manny in several days. He called a few days back wanting a ride to the store but K and I were just leaving for a drive into Orlando. I felt bad about not being able to help him out, called him the next day seeing if he still needed a ride but got no answer. Last time we spoke out at the gate I said whenever he was ready I would take him to the social security office for some business he has there. The folks who live across the road from him want to charge him $50 for a ride there but I got the impression he told them to go straight to hell. Where do they come off anyway asking a near penniless and seriously ill old man for $50 to drive him twenty miles up the road? In my opinion, someone needs to pull their hair while stepping on their collective necks and ask them in threatening tones, “What would Jesus do?” Hallelujah Lord, I’m converted! Go get in the car.

Books at my elbow these days are Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, one I’m rereading after seeing the slightly unsatisfying movie version and Michael Connelly’s The Gods of Guilt. I’m also reading a big thing from poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) called One Art: Letters. I read somewhere recently that she was an exuberant and delightfully articulate letter writer who once wrote forty letters in one day. A collection of her lifelong letters was selected and edited by Robert Giroux and published in 1994. It sounded like something for my book collection and I got lucky, hitting upon a first edition hardback for a paltry $7.50 from a bookseller in Texas. Less than halfway through now and never a hesitation over the 668 pages ahead.

Random Book Babble

Despite the wide open spaces surrounding my four walls here on the edge of America, a familiar closing in kind of mood crept up yesterday, signaling that a few hours escape to Daytona was in order, a drive to help blow away the metaphoric cobwebs. Daily views around home are unfailingly those of distant vistas, panoramic swaths of deep blue and sandy white and people at either at rest or play. Infrequently it’s good to get away from a day of losing oneself in cloud formations and sandy sculptures, to jump into the liveliness of people hustling about their daily work or on errands in crowded shops and streets.

All that is probably just an excuse for me to spend some time in the big Barnes & Noble store in Daytona. I tried a temporary fix the other day by visiting the local Bookland store (a small bookstore owned by Books A Million), but it’s the mini-stop of bookstores and more often than not a waste of time, a useless placebo for book junkies. So it was off to Daytona and the big B&N.

The past two weeks have been a designated re-read period for me, and while keeping up with what’s new on bookstore shelves and in related newsletters, focus has been more on a second look at three books read over the last few years. Not an unusual plan, being one who enjoys returning to a book after a passage of years, this time it was a Julia Glass book from 2002, Three Junes, Haruki Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore (2002) and Edward Rutherfurd’s 2009 historical novel, New York. As it happened, a pre-ordered new release arrived in my mailbox and I squeezed it in between the Murakami and Rutherfurd books; that was Michael Connelly’s latest, The Drop.

Three Junes is a book I would recommend to anyone unreservedly—a fine, fine book. The wonder and skill of Murakami’s latest book 1Q84 is precisely what sent me back to his earlier Kafka on the Shore. Another one to recommend without hesitation. Before the third book on my reread list, I took a couple of days to work my way through the latest Michael Connelly featuring his long established Los Angeles detective, Harry Bosch. Such economic writing from Connelly, not a wasted word or phrase that doesn’t propel his story. Stories about New York, be they old, fictional, historical, contemporary or non-fictional are right down my line. I have always liked the epic books of Edward Rutherfurd and his 2009 book, New York is another historical novel, surpassingly picturesque and studded with fascinating facts concerning the city’s development.

Tuesday in Barnes & Noble was rewarding as usual. There was really only one book on my mind as I entered the store, but you know how that goes. Read the other day on NPR an excerpt of the new Alan Bennett book Smut, and was hoping to lay my hands on that. Took some digging but it was there between two distracting stacks on an out-of-the-way table. On a nearby shelf I came across a book unheard of, unmentioned, or at least in my world; a small 2011 hardback release by Lou Beach titled 420 Characters: Stories. The first thing that caught my eye was a quote from Jonathan Lethem: “Holy sh*t! These are great!” Each of the stories is limited to 420 characters, including letters, spaces and punctuation. Sound familiar? They we're each written as a status update on the author’s Facebook page. One example…

‘The storm came over the ridge, a rocket dropped rain like bees, filled the corral with water and noise. I watched lightning hit the apple trees and thought: “Fritters!” as we packed sandbags against the flood. There was nowhere to go that wasn’t wet, the squall had punched a hole in the cabin roof and the barn was knee-high in mud. We’ll bury Jess later, when the river recedes, before the ground turns hard again.’

That’s it; the end. A haiku-like story that leaves the reader to fill in the blanks.

The last was a totally unexpected find, a new release of Haruki Murakami’s popular 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood. I read this book at the time of it’s first release when I was living in Japan, a time when Murakami was still undiscovered outside of Japan. Since reading 1Q84 I have been thinking again of this and other Murakami books. The new release is in conjunction with the release of a new movie version of the novel. It is a Japanese production, but has been released outside of Japan recently.

Gluttony of a Kind

First to admit it—I’m out of control and blind to the diminishing space and vanishing dollars brought on by my condition. Compulsion comes in a variety of flavors and it’s probably safe to say that some are less dangerous than others and I have to hope my own falls in that category. There’s a lot of compulsive behavior out there I’m happily immune to, but book buying is not one of them. When it comes to buying books, new or old, reason goes out the door.

Pretty soon the living room sofa will have to go. That or trade in the refrigerator for more bookshelves. Existing shelves are full and the stacks of books on tables, chairs and floor are beginning to lean. When someone comes for dinner it requires ten minutes to shift the stacks off the dining table and squeeze out room for place settings.

The past three days have added six more to the stacks, but fortunately only one of them required an outlay of money, and even then the discount was hefty. A quick word about the six pictured above…

• Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, May 2011 — After reading her 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning book, March, I would stand in line to read the author’s grocery list.

• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, 1954 — A book I should have read long ago.

• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, 2010 — In the words of a friend I trust, ‘Drive, don’t walk, to get a copy of A Visit from the Goon Squad. What a voice, different for all the characters, and funny stuff that made me laugh out loud. Been a long time since I laughed like that at something so literary.’

• Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham, 2005 — One by the author that I have not read and couldn't turn down the $1.10 price for a first edition in mint condition. Cunningham is best known for The Hours, another Pulitzer Prize winning work.

• The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly, April 2011 — I’m a Connelly fan, simple as that.

• Naoko by Keigo Higashino, 2004 — Ordered this book because I enjoyed his most recent book, The Devotion of Suspect X so much. Higashino is a huge seller in Japan.

Bang Bang You’re Dead

Very likely that anyone who considers him or herself a fan of writer Raymond Chandler will be familiar with his seminal essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.” The essay was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944, and was a response to Howard Haycrafts’s 1941 book, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, a work which celebrated the Dorothy Sayers-Agatha Christie model of detective fiction.

The style in this essay is very different from Chandler’s mystery stories and novels, and his criticism of British mystery writing razor sharp. The essay has become almost required reading for Chandler fans, and for anyone else hoping to understand how the genre has evolved.

Chandler argues in his essay that all too often—especially in the examples cited by Haycraft—the mystery writer makes an intellectual game of the story. He goes on to attack the contrived situations, the simplistic and improbable characterizations, and solutions devoid of ambiguity. To Chandler it lacks the messiness of real life, and he insists that fiction in any form must be realistic. In an amusing quip, he lambasts some of the famous names in British detective fiction, saying: ‘Personally, I like the English style better…The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.’ (Chandler lived in England until the age of twenty-four.)

A good part of “The Simple Art of Murder” is given to praise of Dashiel Hammett, explaining that Hammett, with his dialogue, characterizations and hard-boiled settings exemplifies the reality-realism necessary to lift the genre to a higher level.

The essay closes with what could be an almost point by point description of Chandler’s famous character, Philip Marlowe, a man operating in the reality of his (and our) society…

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

“He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

Moving forward a few years and looking at a modern writer who surely displays the Chandler legacy, we can see in Michael Connelly’s L.A. shamus, Harry Bosch, a man easily recognizable as the hero Chandler describes in “The Simple Art of Murder.”

“The Simple Art of Murder” complete essay here.