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Monthly Archives: July 2013
BIG BAD AMERICA
Say what you want about Obama, but he sure knows how to kick ass.
[With thanks to PZ . . .]
THE CIRCUS IS COMING
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A NORMAN ROCKWELL FOR TODAY
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A PULP PAPERBACK COVER FOR TODAY
A JOHN SINGER SARGENT FOR TODAY
CATS
Animal tamer Captain Jack Bonavita sitting down with some of his cats, at Coney Island in 1904.
In my short novel Circus, lion tamer Carl Ellenbeck affects Bonavita’s sang froid, but is secretly terrified that his big cats will discover how terrified he is of them, at which point he knows they would immediately tear him to pieces.
Bonavita was utterly fearless, and once appeared in a cage with 27 lions. In 1904, a lion he was performing with attacked him and mangled his arm, which eventually had to be amputated. He continued performing, however, until he was killed in 1917 by a polar bear he was training.
With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .
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LONESOME DAY BLUES
The lyrics to this great song contain the following lines:
I am goin’ to teach peace to the conquered,
I’m gonna tame the proud.
Lots of other people have apparently noticed this before, but I just realized that the lines are a paraphrase of some lines in the Aeneid, when Aeneas’s father, Anchises, in the Underworld, tells him what the mission of Rome will be:
. . . to establish peace,
To spare the humbled, and to conquer the proud.
Anchises’s speech also foretells the history of the early Roman kings.
FEMALE CREATURE
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LIVED IN BARS
Keep an eye out for Wliiam Eggleston in the video, which is cool . . .
A MAGAZINE AD FOR TODAY
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IMAGE
I find this image, from Wong Kar Wai’s latest film The Grandmaster, ravishing.
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IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR
With thanks to Ron Salvatore . . .
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A NEW AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEW
Great Western novella
I bought this book on a recommendation from a friend and enjoyed it, mainly because it’s brief, it’s concise, it’s thrilling and believable and doesn’t talk down to the reader; everything that fiction should be.
Missouri Green is a Western, revolving around the eponymous protagonist, a New Orleans prostitute who tires of her job and decides to make the perilous journey west to California. To help her survive the journey and mine for gold, she buys herself a slave named Jim, a highly-skilled outdoorsman. I can’t help but see this as a blatant reference to Huckleberry Finn, not only because Missouri constantly calls him “N***** Jim,” but because a big part of the plot concerns her learning to respect Jim and view him as a smart, loyal human being.
Jim himself is depicted with more complexity and depth than you typically get from characters like him. He begins the novel openly resentful of Missouri and even comes close to murdering her a couple of times. None of this feels forced, though, thanks to Fonvielle’s crisp, unpretentious style and economical use of words (the book can be read in less than an hour).
I subtracted one star from the book because of the ending, where the book starts to come apart, but otherwise, Missouri Green is worth a look even if you aren’t normally into this kind of genre fiction.
You can buy the book here for only $1.99 — Missouri Green. Kindle owners who subscribe to Amazon Prime can borrow it for free.
PROGRESS REPORT
At the heart of my short novel Circus are two young women, Beth and Anne, The Kelly Twins. They are trapeze artists, brilliant and beautiful. One of them is bitter and malicious, one of them is saintly — but when they fly together, they seem to share a single mind, a single heart, even a single soul.
No one who knows them only on the ground knows them at all, and the adoring men who watch them from the sawdust below, flying together, fall in love with a great mystery.
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