Why do I never hear when they publish this stuff?

Books, books.... My Amazon Wishlist has just gotten a bit fatter, giving me even more stuff that I can pine for and not afford to buy. "The BBook of Geek" sounds hilarious and probably extremely tangent-inducing, particularly if it's half as comprehensive as suggested in this Ars Technica review. But I will be extremely annoyed if they don't have some mention of Starblazers...

But even the BBook of Geek must bow to the marketing brilliance of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", the perfect gift for wives, girlfriends, and Jane Austen fans everywhere.

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action.

Hey, it's a book my wife and I can both enjoy!

A Valentine from Darcy

Dearest Elizabeth,

You above all others know how I detest this day. That we should be expected to lavish gifts and sonnets upon our nearest relations for no other reason than expectation itself! How preposterous! How infuriating! (Your flowers and letter arrived promptly and in good condition, thank you).

And yet there is no escaping the added sorrow hanging over this day. Pemberley ceases to live in your absence, my love. My own heart beats more slowly, and my morning patrols want for their usual liveliness. Yesterday I happened on a small herd of unmentionables in the woods, and could not bring myself to remit them back to Hell. My darling, there is no joy in killing without you.

I hope your stay in Longbourn has been a pleasant one, and I pray you return with no shortage of alacrity. Do be vigilant, though – and keep your Katana near, as there have been frequent reports of trouble in Derbyshire.

Tin Roof Blowdown

I post regularly on a small, private forum devoted largely to chat about classic horror movies, SF, books, NASA news, Godzilla, MST3K, cryptozoology, and other misc sundries of interest to myself and other middle-aged geeks. There is a reviews board there, mainly devoted to horror/sf/fantasy movies & fiction, but I posted this review a year ago because the novel so thoroughly impressed me. It isn't often that one stumbles across crime fiction that transcends over the borders into "literature", but this was one extremely moving and powerful novel. I thought I would copy/paste it here today, given that we're all now counting the hours until Gustav makes landfall, to see if once again New Orleans is going to be devastated. So, my review:

Tin Roof Blowdown, a novel by James Lee Burke

Amazon link

"Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well."
-FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [she chuckles slightly]is working very well for them."
-Barbara Bush, 2005

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
–President Bush, on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
–President Bush, Sept. 2, 2005

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
–Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

James Lee Burke's "Tin Roof Blowdown" is RIVETING. It is part of a mystery series, but it isn't cute characters solving village murders, it's on an entirely higher level. The reason I wanted to post on it was because it's set in New Orleans during and after the Katrina disaster, and is an eye popping read for its up-close depiction of just what living in New Orleans was like through that episode. The main character is a police detective trying to cope with the work overload, catch a gang, deal with a maniac, and stop organized vigilantes from shooting every black person they see. In short, the plot trappings are pretty much the same as most other police procedural thrillers, but the backdrop, the use of language and environment, and the sheer oppressive weight of the tragedy propel "Tin Roof Blowdown" far above the limits of its genre.

This is powerful reading for the stunning descriptions of the destruction of New Orleans. Seeing it through the lead's eyes as he wades to work in chest-deep water, surrounded by gruesome sights (a dead baby hangs in a tree for five days, a hugely fat man drifts past on a raft made of floats, surrounded by beer coolers and drinking as he sails the flooded streets, corpses piled like firewood and left to bloat and rot in the Louisiana heat)... It's a tough read, but an incredibly gripping one. The author pulls no punches concerning the incompetence of the disaster response (The scene at the hospital geriatric ward, where the lead character is warned not to even open the elevator doors on that floor, is truly horrific) It's a tough read, and will definitely upset more sensitive types, but it's one hell of a book.


Some comments from the multitude of five star Amazon reviews:

An Elegy for New Orleans - Burke's lush descriptions of the beauty of New Orleans and Louisiana bayou country are gone, replaced by "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters."

One of the things I like best about Burke's books is that he makes the locale a major player in his stories. He has a love/hate relationship with New Orleans and calls her the Whore of Babylon. When driving through the ruined streets, he muses "New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people." He describes southern Louisiana with lush brushstrokes, from the bayous to the wildlife to the marshes. But where he outdoes himself in The Tin Roof Blowdown is in his descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans. No pictures that you may have seen will accurately tell the story of what happened to this historic city as well as Burke does in narrative form. It is that vivid and that horrible.

The ending of this book will stay with you for a long time - Robicheaux says, "When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.
"But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature."
Katrina is the most ominous character in this book because it was real. Burke shows us scenes of the storm's aftermath: bodies of old people left to rot in the streets by the city's convention center and survivors smashing their china to bits upon learning that their insurance companies will not cover water damage. And of course, there is the grim ghost of the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish, still in ruins two years later.

And finally, an excerpt from a UK review in The Independent:

‘It’s been a long time since a crime novel made me cry. It’s been a long time since a crime novel made every hair on my body stand on end. The Tin Roof Blowdown did both…In my opinion The Tin Roof Blowdown is more than a crime novel; more than a literary novel, even. It is a work of profound historical value and importance that should, no, must be read by anyone interested in what happens when a holocaust breaks loose and civilisation breaks down… There were moments when I wanted to put the book down, it was so painful to continue. But I couldn’t. Nor, I dare say, will anyone else.’

Two Books of Interest

Today's photo is another shot of downtown Herbignac taken on the day of our snow. I love our streetlights.

Some may have already seen this post. I wrote and posted this last Saturday, when Blogger.com was behaving very strangely (It would not allow photo uploads). The post was visible for a day and then vanished mysteriously - I can only assume this was caused by their engineers restoring something from a backup. In any event, the original post was fortuitously archived on my server and is reposted here:


This is just a quickie post to mention two books that may be of interest to fans of French/American culture. The first is Bernard Henri-Levy's American Vertigo. BHL is a self-described "anti-anti-American" - a European intellectual who is genuinely fond of the US instead of falling into the kneejerk "America=Bad" mentality that so many intelligentsia here do. I have not read this book yet, and in fact I am hoping to hear from others who have. I mention it because so much of the cross-culture literature is built on American and British experiences in France, rather than vice-versa, and I for one am very interested to read what this Frenchman thought of the US as he traveled across it.

For a more humorous and stereotypical take on the subject of cultural (mis)relations, I can suggest Stephen Clarke's A Year in the Merde. We received this book as a Christmas gift and it was entertaining and often hilarious from start to finish, though I would in no way suggest that this is a typical look at French culture. Easily half the problems in the book are brought on by the author himself, who carries a thinly-veneered attitude of, "Ah, we Brits are so superior, isn't it quaint how disorganized and backwards these Frenchies are?" While I was able to read it from a neutral perspective and laugh at both the cultural blunders and the author's own skewed perspective, I suspect that French readers might find a good chunk of the book either patronizing or downright offensive. It is in many ways a classic case study of how we make our own problems when we change cultures, according to what aspects of our old culture we drag along with us.

Sloths

Here's another photo of downtown Herbignac in the snow. I think I've taken at least a dozen pictures of this view, but I still like it - This is what one sees after one hikes up a tree-lined dirt road to emerge into the village center. Someday I'm going to have to ask someone about the missing chunk off the top of the church, though I suspect it probably has something to do with either Axis or Allies doing target practice.

Though it is sunny outside today, the weather is still bitterly cold. 33 degrees may not seem so bad, but coupled with a stinging wind whistling down stone streets, it becomes a constant companion on any trip outside - fingers burn with pain, ears go reddened and sore, eyes go Clint Eastwood-squinty, and more and more, we stay in. At the moment this is essential, as we are still struggling to catch up with our work and our money after the disastrous start of the year. But the problem is, it does become a state of mind. I'm sure any self-employed work-at-home person experiences the same sort of cocooned ennui - Get up, work all day without leaving the house, relax afterwards in the house, sleep, and wake to the same thing. With our energy levels suffering the usual grey Breton winter drop, it's tough just crawling out from under the piles of warm blankets in the morning. When the days start compacting inwards like this, I sometimes get stung by a weird sense of loneliness - I will realize with a start that it has been 25 days since I've spoken to another person besides my wife. It isn't so much that I miss the contact with others (I am a non-social surly bastard, at best summation), it is more a sense of dislocated surprise, a sort of, "Wait a second, there is a world out there after all."

I've gotten a bit of comfort from an unexpected source, though. I've just recently launched into "reading" (via unabridged audiobook) Spider Robinson's "Callahan Chronicles", and it has been a breath of fresh air into a calcified week. In the introduction, Spider writes that once a fan tracked him to his unlisted phone number just to call and announce that he was about to commit suicide... unless Spider could tell him that Callahan's Saloon was real, and where it could be found. While I would hate to have been in Spider's shoes at that moment, after reading the moving and warm tales of Callahan's, I can understand the caller's mentality. For those who've never read the stories and didn't go look up the above link, Callahan's Saloon is a nightly gathering spot for all sorts of odd types (including time travelers and aliens) that share one thing in common - a deep sense of humanity and sympathy. I can well understand some of the reviews on Amazon, especially one poster's comment that, "To be honest, I use this book to weed out new people. If they really like the book, then they can become friends. If they dislike this book, or if it's "just okay", then I really don't want to know them. That's how good Callahan is.."

On another topic, for an amusing dose of French/American silliness, check out this article. I never quite know what to make of stuff like this - While it's true that a lot of the French perceptions of what American life must be like are pretty far off, sometimes they are true from angles that I don't immediately see. For instance, the idea that all Americans lived in huge houses with deluxe kitchens (drawn from movies and TV) just seemed goofy.... until I got to know a number of French folks and found that their lodgings and especially their kitchens were often unusually small (at least to my perception). When someone tells you that, "All Americans are rich!", you (US folks, anyway) just want to laugh, and then you start noticing how many houses here are 2/3 the size of their typical US counterparts... how many families own one car instead of two (or three or four).. not to mention the glaring comparisons of each country's GNI per capita (The US GNI per person stands at an average of $41,400 compared to France's $30,090, according to BBC's Facts & Figures).

Some stereotypes are right on the money, though. Words cannot describe how happy Emily and I were to finally get our couch unpacked and set up when we moved here, so we could stop eating dinner at the damned table and return to cheerfully munching our hot wings lying on the couch watching TV.............

Vannes, EU Politics, and American Weeds

(Here's a nature shot taken on the network of forested trails that surround Herbignac)
As I mentioned in today's entry to our pipe blog, we've been extremely busy for the past week - too busy to keep the blogs updated, unfortunately! But, maybe I can make up for that today with a little bit of video. I put this slide show together a couple of years ago to fill out some CDs of pictures and videos that we made for our parents and friends in the states, but I've never posted it on the site until now. The photos are all from our first summer in Brittany, when our friends Beate & Micheal took us to the "old city" area of Vannes for a vacation day. Nice pics, nice music, and mostly nice people! The file is in WMV format, which I'm sure will provoke lots of complaining, but I made it back when Windows Moviemaker was all I had to work with (and I am entirely too lazy to try to go back and change it now). NOTE - This video was taken down to save server space and bandwidth, sorry.

We have to give a delayed welcome to Germany's new (and first female) chancellor Angela Merkel. She's been in all the news here, with everyone wondering which way she will go (not that she seems to have that many options considering the fractious coalition government she is leading). She's vowing to keep French-German relations close, but also to improve Germany's wobbly relations with the US. It's funny - I lived my whole life barely knowing the names of any foreign leaders, but now I follow closely the Unholy Trinity of French/UK/German politicking. It makes entertaining reading, especially as the UK slowly moves into a greater driving role in the EU after France shot its own feet off with that constitution vote. I do not mean to imply that I think the EU would be better off with the UK in the lead - I have no vested interest either way. It simply makes good drama to this outsider's eyes to watch the struggles between the very vested interests. I am particularly looking forward to the next presidential elections in France! Watching someone else's political system at work is a lot more fun than it sounds.

"There is a long, not so noble expatriate tradition of sitting around citing the faults of one's hosts, that is, the people who populate the country where you live."
So opens this book review of 'French and Americans, The Other Shore', which sounds interesting, more so if it is on the level with Raymonde Carroll's "Cultural Misunderstandings". That was probably the most serious, sociological consideration of US & French cultural differences that I've encountered, though it may be a bit outdated today. One of the more amusing insights I've read regarding the difference in national psyches was that the modern French person is like a delicate greenhouse plant - carefully, fanatically cultivated by his/her parents in a very controlled environment, with rigid standards of behavior, constant clipping & trimming, until they grow into a very specialized flower with exotic blooms which is totally dependant on its enclosed environment for existence and identity. By contrast, Americans were said to be like wildflowering weeds - pretty much left to make their own decisions from childhood, in order to develop toughness and durability and the adaptability needed to take root anywhere, at the expense of exotica. A fairly accurate assessment, from my experience! But, to get back to the quoted passage that started the paragraph, one thing that I try (accent on try) not to do with this blog is turn it into a long litany of whining about what's wrong with France or the French.

This brings me to a question - What would readers like to see in this blog? Email me or reply via comment please. I would be curious to hear what people want to read more of, be it food, culture, movies, travels, or whatever. Speaking of movies, we watched "Fantastic Four" the other night and it was quite fun (and nowhere near as bad as I was braced for). I grew up reading FF in the Silver Age years and they were my favorite comic for a big chunk of my childhood. I thought the movie did a good job of capturing the sense of fun in those old comics, before the 90's came along and all comicbook heroes became grim and borderline psychotic. While some of the actors were questionable (Alba as the matron mother figure of the Marvel universe?), I would recommend the movie to anyone who remembers the FF in the days of Willie the mailman and the Baxter Building, before the Invisible Girl became the Invisible Woman and shed her blue bodysuit for a spiked chrome bikini.