Deeds & Words

I’m only about halfway through Blind Allegiance. This is not normally the kind of book I read, but Jeanne Devon, who writes the Mudflats blog, co-wrote it, so of course I had to get it. It broke in the top 100 on Amazon, hitting the lower 40s at its peak. 

Since the full title is Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin, I did expect the book to be somewhat about Palin, and it is. It is more about the main author though, Frank Bailey, who managed her gubernatorial campaign and worked for her when she was governor, and his loss of his soul (and the subsequent, we hope, regaining of it).

What makes Frank Bailey’s book different from other boring campaign tell-alls is that he brings e-mails sent by Palin. Lots of e-mails: between 50,000-60,000. Not all of them are in the book, of course. It is the e-mails, which are irrefutable, that make the Palin camp dislike Bailey so much, and probably what spawns the epithet “disloyal” instead of the more common “disgruntled.”  While Palin was governor, she and her “inner circle” conducted state business through private e-mail accounts like Yahoo and G-mail. An Alaskan citizen actually filed an ethics complaint about this, demanding that the e-mails be made available to the public since the public’s business was conducted there. The finding was that, while it is a bad practice to conduct state business on a non-secure private e-mail account, the accounts were private and do not have to be opened to the public. Using that same logic, Bailey is making the e-mails sent to his own personal account available in his book. And now, that’s the subject of an ethics investigation. All very circular.

What stands out, and I’ve only finished Chapter Eleven, is how quickly Frank Bailey and the “Rag Tag,” as Palin’s inner circle of campaign volunteers called themselves, relaxed their ethics in their zeal to get her elected.

The first startling example was the letters to the editor. Palin was in a three-way race in the primary, and the Republican candidate picked up some of her ideas and sound bites and began using them. He also designed a website that had some of the same elements as Palin’s. Palin was furious about this. I guess she believed that she had some kind of intellectual property right to these elements, (the color red, Abraham Lincoln), and was incensed that her opponent could get away with using them. One day, Frank got an e-mail from Palin that read, “Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would write a letter to the editor of the Alaska Daily News, and just say something like this?”  Then, in three paragraphs, she writes the letter: 1) Sarah Palin is fresh, feisty and a reformer; 2) Can’t help noticing that the other Republican candidate is stealing her ideas; 3) Wow, her opponent’s website looks just like Sarah’s!  Isn’t that cheating?

Frank e-mails back that, yes, it would be nice if someone wrote a letter like that. Then they decide that since someone (Palin) already has, they’ll just get a neighbor or friend of a campaigner to send it in to the ADN. They do, and it gets published. This sends them off on a flurry of letter writing. They are careful to make sure that the people they give the finished letters to, to sign and mail from their addresses, are never directly involved with the campaign. Later, when the campaign’s lawyer e-mails Frank that the campaign should not get caught proofing (editing) letters, Frank thinks how upset the guy would be if he knew the campaign was writing the letters.

Is this so bad, really?  I mean, every time any local non-profit is applying for a grant and needs a letter of support, they send me a ‘sample.’  I frequently draft “talking points” for our allies in funding fights or initiatives. Is there a difference?  Yes, I think there is; and more importantly, so did Frank Bailey. Unfortunately for Frank Bailey, he thought there was a line that had been crossed only as he saw that line dwindling in his moral rear-view mirror.

This was the first example, the pinch to the gut that Bailey ignored. What comes through in so many words, so far at least, was the idea that these things were okay because God wanted Palin to get elected.

Historically, the chosen of God don’t usually fare so well. The Jews, Jesus Christ and Joan d’Arc come to mind as examples. If you are really chosen by God, it seems that a short life and early death are probably what you should expect. If you are going to live, you should do it with an attitude of complete humility. Contrast this with the beliefs of self-styled “Christians” like Palin and her crew, who act on the assumption that once you are chosen by God, the usual rules don’t apply to you. Lying, cheating?  Those are terrible things for those other people to do. For us, though?  It’s okay. God wants us to win. Spying on others, suborning people who are contractually obligated to work for the opponent?  Despicable!  For us, though?  It’s okay. God wants us to win. 

I was startled by the letters. It seemed so obviously wrong and kind of childish, besides. I didn’t know what was coming. I hadn’t read up to the part, yet, about Andrew Halcro.

Newsweek named Grand Rapids, Michigan “A Dying City.”  Rachel Maddow’s Blog shared the city’s response.  Click here.  It’s ten minutes long, and I don’t particularly care for the version of the song, but I love their energy!  This is not a moribund city.

Speaking of moribund, or at least delightfully morbid:  Unfilmable.com reports that someone is doing an independent film of three HP Lovecraft short stories.  They are calling it Arkham Sanitarium.  They began filming Friday, May 13, 2011.  The Rapture was slated for 5/21.  The film will be released in October, 2011.  New date for the Rapture is October, 2011.  Coincidence?

nothing but style

It takes more than 15 seconds to load (nearly twice as long) but there is something there.  Just click on it.

In 1990, Great Work of Time won the World Fantasy Award for best novella.  I’m surprised someone hasn’t snapped up John Crowley’s short book, given it a glossy steam-punk cover, and re-released it. Of course it isn’t steam-punk.  John Crowley’s work doesn’t fit easily into any sub-genre except Things John Crowley Has Written.  Still, Great Work of Time has enough of the British Empire, airships, alternate histories, train terminals, misty London cityscapes, and men with bowler hats and tightly furled umbrellas to justify a steam-punk cover, which might introduce a whole new generation of readers to this unusual and powerful writer.

Great Work of Time starts with a forest under the sea.  Or maybe it starts with Caspar Last, an impoverished genius. Last has invented a way to travel in time.  It is not a machine, at least not in the sense of toothed wheels, cogs, and flashing lights.  After much detailed thought, Caspar figures out a way to go into the past and create a situation that will garner him, in his present timeline, “a nice bit of change.”   In 1986, Casper does just that.

Or perhaps the story starts with twenty-three-year-old Denys Winterset, in 1956, in a British Empire upon which the sun has never set.  Denys, posted to a docile, British-dominated Africa, plans to go home for the holidays.  He takes the Cape-to-Cairo train, noticing the young couple in the car with him:

“Denys watched them and their excitement, feeling old and wise.  Americans, doubtless; they had that shy, inoffensive air of all Americans abroad, that wondering quality of children let out from a dark and oppressive school to play in the sun.”

In Khartoum, awaiting his dawn airship ride to London, Denys is approached by George Davenant, who invites him to dinner.  Davenant regales Denys with stories of grand adventures, but he also seems to know a lot about Denys, which causes Denys some discomfort.  Davenant acknowledges this himself, and then spins the wildest tale of all.  What if there were, he asks, a secret society dedicated to keeping the world on track, or at least on track for the British Empire.  What if the agents of that society could move not only geographically, but temporally?  Denys leaves the dinner clutching a strange key, half-convinced that the whole episode is a dream.

Our present stretches out in a line.  Our past and future lie, not behind and before it, but at right angles to it.  It is this strange geometry that allows the President pro tem of the Otherhood (their Presidents are always pro tem) to visit Caspar Last in 1986, and Cecil Rhodes in 1896, and a timeless city in a nameless time, where he meets a magus and an angel. It is this strange geometry that allows this secret society of time travelers to keep the British Empire alive. At the center of the story is a plot conjured by the Otherhood to kill Cecil Rhodes, twelve years before his natural death, to protect an endowment Rhodes has left them in his will, and prevent a timeline that includes two world wars, upheaval and revolution, untold death and misery.  Crowley portrays Rhodes, most famous for the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, a businessman, visionary and bigot, as a man standing on that right angle of history, poised at an historical crossroads he himself cannot see.

Crowley never forsakes his love of words.  Names matter, as jokes or allusions, adding depth to the complicated work. “Casper Last” evokes the Three Magi, and there are magi in this story.  It also evokes the mysterious Kaspar Hauser, who appeared from nowhere one day on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany in 1828.  “Last” is the ultimate, the final.  It’s also a verb meaning to continue or survive.  The Otherhood calls the time travel apparatus, whatever it is, “The Last Equipment.”

Toward the end of the book, a member of the Otherhood explains how it feels to travel to a point in time and change history, and feel it change around you:

“. . . ‘I knew, you see, what it meant that I let slip the moment; that now I could not go back the way I had come.  The world had opened for a moment, and I and my companions had gone down through it to this time and place; and now it had closed over me, seamless and whole.”

Whole, or hole?  Both.

The words don’t always cast allusions or have double meanings.  Sometimes they just bring beauty:

“As the train chugged out across the span, aimed at Cairo thousands of miles away, passing here the place hard-sought-after a hundred years ago—the place where the Nile had its start—the spray did fall on the train just as Cecil Rhodes had imagined it, flung spindrift hissing on the locomotive, drops speckling the window they looked out of, and rainbowing the white air.  The young Americans were still with wonder, and Denys, too, felt a lifting of his heart.”

Crowley’s roots are in fantasy but his more recent works have been literary without much of the fantastical.  What a joy it is to go back to a piece like Great Work of Time and see the concepts and conceits he will expand on in The Aegypt Quartet and The Translator. This book is not just a literary footnote in the career of an extraordinary writer.  For all my earlier joking about steam-punk, this story has plenty to say to readers who love the “what-if” game of history. There is talk that several African nations plan to work together to build the Cape-to-Cairo railway.  Perhaps it is time to bring this slender book back.

Click here for an interesting story about selling off federal land in Utah to balance the national budget.

Here’s my favorite quote:

“I’m not an economist, but I have maintained a household,” Ross told Reuters. “The federal government owns 70 percent of Utah, for example. There are federal buildings. If you need cash, let’s start liquidating.”

Representative Ross, I see your point.  I’m not a neurosurgeon, but I have removed several splinters in my lifetime.  Let’s get out the bone saw, pop your lid and take a look at your gray matter, shall we?

Poltergeist/Kat Richardson

Roc Fantasy, 2007

Poltergeist is the second Kat Richardson Greywalker novel.  In the book, a few years have passed since Greywalker, marked by the growth of Ben and Mara’s son Brian from a babe-in-arms to a talking toddler, and Harper Blaine’s increasing proficiency in navigating the transitional dimension next to ours, called the Grey.

Harper is hired by an egotistical and unethical professor of psychology to vet the results of an experiment in the paranormal.  Professor Tuckman has gathered together a group of eight people and is attempting to re-create the 1970s “Philip Aylesworth” experiment, creating an artificial ghost based on the group’s energy.  Tuckman wants Harper to confirm that the results the group is now getting with their manufactured ghost, “Celia,” are genuine, except, of course, for the results he has already faked, in order to “encourage” the participants.

While she is inventorying the lab where the experiments take place, Harper slips into the Grey and observes a disturbing knot of psychic energy.  Before she can interview all the participants of the group, “Celia” brutally murders one of them.  As Harper begins to investigate, the ghost becomes increasingly violent, attacking the group members both in and out of the lab.

Richardson is confident in this second outing.  The supporting characters are developed and have just enough time and space in the story.  Harper’s experiments in the Grey are interesting.  Structurally, the plot has a couple of cracks that bothered me.  Midway through the book, Harper comes across a piece of information about one of the group members that should be, not only a red flag, but a big flashing red light.  She does investigate this, but in a leisurely way. Later in the book, she captures the poltergeist energy in an ingenious magical device, but the entity escapes.  The escape is telegraphed several pages in advance and makes Harper seem negligent when she isn’t.  Richardson needs the entity to escape so she can get us to the devastating climax of the book, but somehow this is done at Harper’s expense.

Balancing these problems, the descriptions of Seattle are fresh, concrete and witty.  In the first book, I worried that Harper had no non-magical friends.  In Poltergeist, with the bookstore owner and the restaurant family, we begin to see Harper’s network of friends from before she became a Greywalker.

The story is very dark, and Harper’s pet ferret, Chaos, provides a bundle of warmth, energy and humor to break up the bleakness.

The concept of a manufactured psychic entity, controlled by and feeding on a human collective is not completely new (witness the actual experiment Richardson used as a springboard) but the Greywalker abilities, the well-described settings and Richardson’s characters make this an original use of the element.  I am very satisfied with this series and will be looking around for the next book.

As we all know, Judgment day is Saturday.  Many believers will be raptured away.  But what about the rest of us, stuck here on planet earth?  I believe in looking on the bright side.

So, if the rapture really did happen, what are the plusses?

1)  Once we get their abandoned cars off the roads, commutes should become easier.

2) Shorter lines for coffee.

3)  No worries about running out of influenza vaccine. 

4)  That annoying GOP majority in the House of Reps?  Gone.

5) I’m thinking, shorter wait lists for books at the library, but that may not prove out.

6)  Hey!  No one talking about the rapture or sticking a big old billboard right in your line of sight on the freeway! 

7)  Less banning of books in schools, perhaps?

Spouse and I walked down to our downtown cinema to see Thor on Saturday.  We opted for plain 2-D. It was pretty clear which scenes would be breathtaking in immersive 3-D, but the film is entertaining and beautiful in flatland version, too. 

Kenneth Branaugh did a fine job of directing, bringing just enough comic book sensibility to the screen.  Like the original Ironman, the movie bit off just enough story, not more than it could chew.  Thor’s character development is credible within this time-frame, and the arc of the villain is plausible.  The movie has a complex villain worthy of hero, and worthy of the special effects. 

Casting-wise, this is an interesting mix of new talent and award-nominee heavy-weights, with Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Rene Russo looking elegant and politician’s-wife-like as Frigga, and Natalie Portman doing a fine job as Jane, a geo-physicist. (Yes, I know in the comic-book she was a nurse.  That wouldn’t have worked here.  Get over it.)  Chris Helmsworth, who isn’t exactly an unknown, navigates the thunder god’s rough road to maturity in a naturalistic way that convinced me he should get his hammer back.  Tom Hiddleston as Loki, however, was compelling, giving a layered and emotionally piercing performance, which is good news for the continued franchise.  

In Asgard, Thor has four warrior friends, and I had that annoying experience of going, “I know who that is. . . who is it?” every time the big eater would show up or speak.  Thank goodness for imdb.com!  That was the actor who played Pullo in the HBO series Rome. 

The elements of this movie balance.  The Asgard and wormhole scenes do not overpower, although they are stunning. The action sequences are broken up appropriately with quiet moments and humor, and little bits of homely life as when Thor carries home Eric after a few too many in the local bar. Hemsdale plays Thor correctly as arrogant and brash, loving and vulnerable, and ultimately honorable. Stellar Skarsgard delivers a disciplined, understated performance as Eric, and it’s easy to take the character for granted and not see how much he powers the earth portion of the plot. 

SHIELD is appropriately ambiguous here.  They are the good guys, doing a bad thing, and doing it in a calm professional way that makes them annoying.  Perfect call! In Thor, the shadowy government group (who truly are good guys) do not have to be stupid to make the plot work.  I appreciated that.

Special effects range from pretty to stunning.  Like any big effects/action movie, I have several plot quibbles that occurred to me after I left the theater (the Odinsleep?  Now?  Really?). While I was watching it, I was conscious only of enjoying it.  The first summer movie of 2011 is two hours of fun and thrills.

Last Saturday the Four-Eyed Frog had an in-store special, walk-in or call, order two books and the third book is free.  Since this was an inventory-reduction activity, it was limited to stock on hand.  We called and ordered six books and the first box showed up yesterday! 

Half our order appeared.  There were two Monkeewrench thrillers from the mother-and-daughter writing team of P.J. Tracy, and one Greywalker fantasy by Kat Richardson. 

Spouse gets dibs on the Monkeewrench books because they were his order.  I started Poltergeist last night.  This book is based on a real experiment that took place in Canada, and the information about faked séances (and not-so-faked séances) is fascinating, with a nice hat-tip to the classic Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Strong Poison.

I’m waiting for some Jim Butcher books in Box Two—not to mention my previous order that includes some reference books on Victorian architecture and two reprints of H. Rider Haggard novels. 

Speaking of books . . .  Chad Hull has a blog called Fiction is So Over-Rated, and I suggest you pop over there and read his insightful and thoughtful review of a book called Annabel.  I enjoy all of Chad’s reviews, but this is an author I haven’t heard of, and Chad goes into depth about the book.  It’s an excellent commentary on a novel with an intriguing premise.