When Mike the Musicologist and I were running around over the weekend, we swung by the Half-Price Books in Cedar Park. And I found a couple of interesting things for $7.99 (plus tax) each…
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Hoplobibliophilia, act 3.
Friday, September 30th, 2022Hoplobibliophilia 18, Cowboys 13.
Wednesday, September 28th, 2022Continuing my attempt to clean out the backlog…
I don’t think I buy a lot of new expensive gun books. I haven’t bought any of Ian’s, for example: while I am sort of interested in bullpups, French military rifles, and guns of the Chinese warlords, I look at Ian’s prices and say, “I’m not that interested.”
Paying $100+ for a book still gives me the leaping fantods. It has to be something I’m really interested in: either for collector value (like the Samworths) or on a topic I’m interested in (the history of sniping, for example).
So these two represent a departure from my norm. He says that while he considers paying $300 for another book. But in the meantime…
Onward through the hoplobibliophiliac fog.
Monday, September 26th, 2022Previously:
I believe I had mentioned that a friend of mine in the Association had been tipping me off to gun books online.
I believe I had also mentioned that my tax refund had come in. Plus my bonus payment from my employer is coming this week.
The end result is: I’ve accumulated a bunch more gun books. I have a stack. And I’m way behind in documenting them Lawrence style.
Which is…okay. Except they’re stacking up on the kitchen table, and if I don’t move them in the next few days, I’m going to get griped at. So I thought I’d do a couple a day, maybe every other day, until the backlog is cleared.
No, no, don’t thank me: I run a full service blog here. But I will put in a jump…
Obit watch: September 23, 2022.
Friday, September 23rd, 2022Hilary Mantel, author of historical fiction.
She was someone I’d heard of, but never read. I didn’t know, until I read the obit, that those three books are a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and now I kind of want to read them.
Maarten Schmidt, astronomer. He did a lot of work on quasi-stellar radio sources, or “quasars”.
In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.
What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.
And once he knew the speed — 30,000 miles a second — Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object’s distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun.
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The question remained: If these objects weren’t stars, what were they? Theories proliferated. Some said they were the fading embers of a giant supernova. Dr. Schmidt and others believed instead that in a quasar, astronomers could see the birth of an entire galaxy, with a black hole at the center pulling together astral gases that, in their friction, generated enormous amounts of energy — an argument developed by Donald Lynden-Bell, a physicist at Cambridge University, in 1969.
If that was true, and if quasars really were several billion light years away, it meant that they were portraits of the universe in its relative infancy, just a few billion years old. In some cases their light originated long before Earth’s solar system was even formed, and offered clues to the evolution of the universe.
Sara Shane, actress. Other credits include the 1950s “Dragnet”, “The Outer Limits”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, and the “I Led 3 Lives” TV series.
The Times has published two obits over the past couple of days for people who weren’t all that famous, but were interesting for reasons.
John Train. He was a co-founder of “The Paris Review”. He was an author: among other things, he wrote three books about “remarkable names of real people”.
And he was also kind of a shadowy power broker:
Yet he was also an operator in high finance and world affairs who, by one researcher’s account, had ties to U.S. secret services. Mr. Train founded and ran a leading financial firm devoted to preserving the money of rich families, and he worked to support the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The multifariousness of his career defies definition, but one quality did underlie his many activities. Mr. Train exemplified the attitudes and values of the exalted class he was born into: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the postwar era. He was globe-bestriding but also self-effacing, erudite but also pragmatic, cosmopolitan but also nationalistic, solemn at one moment and droll the next.
Allan M. Siegal. This is one of those internal NYT obits, but Mr. Siegal was an old-line Times guy, so his obit is of some interest.
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“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don’t” was one of Mr. Siegal’s favorite injunctions, articulated long before media outlets in the digital era began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another: “Being fair is better than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was expansive. But on no subject was he more authoritative than The Times itself.
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In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the fall of the newsroom’s top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper’s ethical and organizational practices.
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job: standards editor. Mr. Siegal was the first to be named to the position, adding the title to that of assistant managing editor, a post he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. At the time, his name had been listed among the paper’s top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page, more than twice as long as anyone else’s.
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Mr. Siegal was capable of withering criticism. His post-mortem critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in precise penmanship with a green felt-tip pen (known as “greenies” among the staff, they showed up well against black-and-white newsprint, he found) — could be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Name names” and “Absurd!”
Once, having demanded that a headline combine several complex elements in a short word count, he found the result wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
But his rockets were also astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters in the finer points of style and tone. And perhaps because he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. “Nice, who?” was his trademark comment when he thought a headline or caption, by an anonymous editor, was especially artful. (The answer, the name of the editor, would appear — to the editor’s great pride — in the next day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine and distributed throughout the news department.)< Other critiques showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpkin spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (rather than foie gras), “we should stick to chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the football coach Mike Ditka “should recover” from a heart attack, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Unless God returns our call, we shouldn’t predict in such cases.”
Obit watch: September 15, 2022.
Thursday, September 15th, 2022Mark Miller. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Adam-12”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Harry O”.
Fred Franzia, cheap wine guy.
His most famous acquisition was Charles Shaw, a label with a strong reputation among winemakers that filed for bankruptcy in 1995. In 2002, Mr. Franzia started selling the wine exclusively at Trader Joe’s for $1.99 a bottle (in some cities, it can now cost up to $3.99). The wine became affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck.
The company says it has sold over 1 billion bottles.
Two Buck Chuck is now $3.99? Thanks, Joe Biden!
(Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, by Iosif Shkolovsky. Vodka bottles and wine bottles are pretty similar in size, right?)
Good news, bad news.
Wednesday, September 14th, 2022Good news: per “The Rap Sheet”, Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Victor’s in Minneapolis have re-opened. You may recall they were burned down by rioters in 2020.
Bad news:
Okay. Paranormal romance? Yeah, the heck with that noise. But don’t mess with my true crime or submarine adventure novels, man!
Obit watch: September 13, 2022.
Tuesday, September 13th, 2022An era has ended. Jean-Luc Godard has died at 91: per his legal advisor, he chose assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic due to “multiple disabling pathologies”. Alt link. THR. Variety.
As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
When his first feature-length film as a director, “Breathless” (“À Bout de Souffle”), was released in 1960, Mr. Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labeled La Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave.
For Mr. Godard, as well as for New Wave friends and associates like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.
Although “Breathless” was not the first New Wave film (both Mr. Chabrol’s 1958 “Beau Serge” and Mr. Truffaut’s 1959 “400 Blows” preceded it), it became representative of the movement. Mr. Godard unapologetically juxtaposed plot devices and characters inherited from genre films and emotional material dredged up, in almost diarylike form, from the filmmaker’s personal life.
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In 2010, Mr. Godard, long at odds with Hollywood, was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, but not without controversy. The award brought into focus long-simmering accusations that Mr. Godard held antisemitic views. He did not attend the ceremony at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the honor, and when an interviewer afterward asked him what the award meant to him, he was blunt.
“Nothing,” he said. “If the academy likes to do it, let them do it.”
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When his parents refused to support him financially, hoping that he would take more responsibility for himself, Mr. Godard began stealing money — from his family members and their friends and even from the office of Cahiers du Cinema. This went on for five years.
He distributed some of the proceeds to fellow filmmakers, lending Rivette enough money to make his film debut with “Paris Belongs to Us.”
“I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films,” he told The Guardian in 2007.
After his mother secured a job for him with a Swiss television outfit, he stole from his employer and, in 1952, landed in jail in Zurich. His father obtained his quick release, but only after Mr. Godard agreed to spend several months in a mental hospital.
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As the 1960s unfolded, Mr. Godard continued to work at a breakneck pace, turning out sketches for compilation films — including “RoGoPaG” (1963) and “Paris vu Par ” (1965) — alongside features like “Band of Outsiders” (1964), “Une Femme Mariée” (1964), “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and “Masculin Féminin” (1966).
In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard plucked a character from the French popular cinema, the private detective and secret agent Lemmy Caution, along with the expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine, who had played Caution (or variations on the character) in many films, and dropped him down in a dystopian future ruled by a giant computer.
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As he grew older, Mr. Godard seemed more intolerant of other film directors. He quarreled bitterly with Truffaut, once his closest friends among the New Wave directors. He was especially scathing toward Steven Spielberg. In the 2001 film “In Praise of Love,” he portrays Spielberg representatives trying to buy the film rights to the memories of a Jewish couple who fought in the French Resistance. Commenting on the film’s sourness, the Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2002 that it “completes Mr. Godard’s journey from one of the cinema’s great radicals to one of its crankiest reactionaries.”
Mr. Godard’s personality was as difficult to warm to as many of his films were. Biographers filled paged after page with details of his feuds and schisms. He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. When a talk show interviewer reunited Mr. Godard and Ms. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard’s indifferent response to a question about their romance caused Ms. Karina to leave the set.
This goes unmentioned in the obits, but I have to bring it up: “Made In U.S.A.”, about which I have written before. In brief: Goddard adapting a Westlake Parker novel, except he changed it around considerably and didn’t actually pay Westlake, leading to legal action. Pay the writer, you clown!
Lance Mackey. He won the Iditarod four times.
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But after his string of wins, he was burdened by personal problems, health scares and drug issues that prevented him from ever again reaching the top of the sport.
The treatment for his throat cancer cost him his saliva glands and ultimately disintegrated his teeth. He was then diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome, which limits circulation to the hands and feet and is exacerbated by the cold weather that every musher must contend with in the wilds of Alaska.
In the 2015 race, he couldn’t manipulate his fingers to do simple tasks, like putting bootees on his dogs’ paws to protect them from the snow, ice and cold. His brother and fellow competitor Jason Mackey agreed to stay with him at the back of the pack to help him care for the dogs.
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Mackey and his wife divorced after splitting up in 2011. She had earlier had three children who Mackey embraced as his own, Outside reported. During Mackey’s last Iditarod, in 2020, he raced with his mother’s ashes. He was later disqualified after testing positive for methamphetamine, and he entered rehab on the East Coast.
Months after the 2020 race finished, his partner, Jenne Smith, died in an all-terrain vehicle accident. They had two children.
He was 52. Cancer got him.
Javier Marías, prominent Spanish novelist. I’d never heard of the guy, though his name got mentioned a lot as a Nobel Prize candidate. But he sounds like someone I would have enjoyed drinking with.
Mr. Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author. His novels were greeted like blockbuster summer films, he received practically every prize available to a Spanish writer, and he was regularly considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the few awards to elude his grasp. Most critics considered him the greatest living Spanish writer; some said the greatest since Miguel de Cervantes.
He was more than just a famous novelist. Mr. Marías wrote a widely read weekly column in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, where he set down his thoughts on everything from bike lanes (he hated them) to the Spanish government (which he also detested, regardless of the party in power).
He cultivated a public image as a curmudgeon, but in person he was generous and witty, inviting interviewers for long conversations in his dimly lit study, his fingers tweezering an ever-present cigarette. (One column he wrote in 2006, for The New York Times, castigated Madrid’s antismoking laws as “far more befitting of Franco than a democracy.”)
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He wore his fame lightly, and joked that such comparisons said less about his talents than they did about a general decline in literary achievement. When “The Infatuations” won the state-run National Novel Prize, one of Spain’s highest literary awards, he rejected the $20,000 in prize money, saying he did not want to be indebted to a government of any kind.
He did maintain one such relationship, though: In 1997 he became king of Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. The fictional Kingdom of Redonda is something of a running in-joke among European artists, who occupy the throne and make up most of its peerage. After his predecessor, the author Jon Wynne-Tyson, abdicated in his favor, Mr. Marías took the royal name Xavier I.
Like most modern monarchs, his role was largely ceremonial, his primary duty being to dispense noble titles to other artistic worthies — he named the director Pedro Almodóvar the Duke of Trémula and Mr. Ashbery the Duke of Convexo.
As of press time, a successor to King Xavier I had not been named, though several pretenders claim the throne as theirs.
The struggle continues.
Saturday, September 10th, 2022For those of you who are people of the gun, and especially those interested in holsters:
My fellow book collecting friend in the Association just tipped me off to the fact that there’s a second edition of Holstory. I wrote about the fist edition here: according to the website, the second edition adds three new chapters.
I really enjoyed the first edition (which I read cover to cover as soon as I could after that post), and have no qualms about recommending that you order the second edition if you didn’t order the first. I’ve already ordered my personal copy. (And no, I do not get any kickbacks or free books from the authors: I just happen to think this is a swell book.)
Personal indulgence (possibly noteworthy for others).
Thursday, September 8th, 2022I’ve been listening to the Hornady Podcast.
They cover a wide variety of topics. They’ve talked about various hunting opportunities (including Africa). They do interviews with prominent individuals in the industry like Jerry Miculek. (And, on a side note, I really enjoyed their interview with Kristy Titus. Not in the “oooh, a girl in the gun industry”, or the “I want to marry this woman” sense, but: here’s a person who seems to have their head screwed on straight, knows what they know and what they don’t know, and is actively working to fill in the gaps on what they don’t know. I find that admirable. I hadn’t heard of Ms. Titus before this: now I’m a fan.)
And they’ve done several podcasts on interior (what happens to the bullet inside the gun) and exterior (what happens to the bullet in flight) ballistics. Those podcasts are really deep dives into the way things work. If you’re a gun person with a techy bent at all, I encourage you to listen.
Episode 35 is a listener Q&A session. If you listen to the first few minutes of it, you might hear a name you recognize. You can listen to the whole thing if you’d like (I’d encourage that) but the “relevant” (for some value of “relevant”) part comes early.
A couple of quick points:
- Remember this post? Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Preston from Hornady had told me they were doing a Q&A at some point, and asked if he could use my questions on the show. Of course I said yes.
- There’s a bit more to the questions I asked than what made it on to the show. What’s on the show is a very good summary of one of the questions I asked. Preston and I had a long conversation about both of my questions. I’m not kidding: Preston actually called me on the phone and we talked through this stuff. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with their support for some random murder hobo. (I don’t think anybody at Hornady even knows I blog.)
- They didn’t really go into my second question on this podcast, but that’s okay. They did kind of briefly touch on it, and, from what they said, they plan a much deeper dive into that question in some future podcast. Which is awesome.
- Never read the YouTube comments. Seriously. I know I’m taking this personal-like, but Preston and the rest of the gang was so nice to me, I can’t imagine how people could treat them like crap in the YouTube comments. I guess a lot of people have trouble remembering there are real people behind the screen.
And, actually, some other things are coming together. My project for the Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association came to fruition and is active now. I’ve even received some nice feedback. (You can’t access it unless you’re a member. Which you should be if you’re interested in Smith and Wessons.)
The government finally mailed my tax refund. I haven’t gotten official word yet, but I’ve gotten “unofficial” word on my corporate bonus and pay for the next two quarters (at least) and been reassured there won’t be any layoffs on my team.
And I’ve been talking to a fellow collector, and there’s some more hoplobibilophilia coming soon-ish.
In the meantime, as we often say, look for the smiling face of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on every bottle!
Obit watch: September 7, 2022.
Wednesday, September 7th, 2022Peter Straub, noted writer.
Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like “Julia” (1975) and “Ghost Story” (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.
Not that he could complain about what critics and readers thought. Starting with “Julia,” his third novel, about a woman who is haunted by a spirit that may or may not be her dead daughter, Mr. Straub won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that had previously been sidelined as sub-literary.
“He was a unique writer in a lot of ways,” Mr. King said in a phone interview on Monday. “He was not only a literary writer with a poetic sensibility, but he was readable. And that was a fantastic thing. He was a modern writer, who was the equal of say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things.”
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Dr. Ronald Glasser. He was another one of those folks I had not heard of before, but he wrote a highly acclaimed book, 365 Days.
Dr. Glasser was opposed to the war when he was drafted in August 1968.
He was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan — one of four frenetic Army hospitals in Japan that every month were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 injured troops airlifted from the battlefields of Vietnam during their 365-day tours of duty.
Dr. Glasser was originally assigned as a pediatrician to treat the families of military dependents in Japan. But, he wrote, “I soon realized that the troopers they were pulling off those medevac choppers were only children themselves.”
“365 Days,” published in 1971, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The playwright David Mamet hailed it in The Wall Street Journal as “the best book to come out of Vietnam, and yet the author wasn’t stationed there.”
Dr. Glasser explained in “365 Days” that he had never intended to become a writer, but that he felt compelled to record what he had seen and heard at the hospital. He dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, the author of the novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” which vividly described the bloody battlegrounds of the Civil War.
“I did not start writing for months, and even then it was only to tell what I was seeing and being told, maybe to give something to these kids that was all theirs without doctrine or polemics, something that they could use to explain what they might not be able to explain themselves,” Dr. Glasser wrote.
“As for me,” he continued, “my wish is not that I had never been in the Army, but that this book could never have been written.”
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The book was banned from some public libraries because it liberally quoted the soldiers’ use of profanity. Dr. Glasser was unapologetic.
“The truth as I saw it was that common language failed,” he testified in a court case contesting the ban. “It didn’t express their anguish. It wasn’t enough.”
CleCon!
Tuesday, September 6th, 2022That’s Cleveland content, for my peeps in Ohio.
Daniel Stashower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl) has a new book out: American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper, about the Cleveland Torso Murders.
He also has a good piece up at CrimeReads tied to the book and his family history in Cleveland. I had no idea he was a good Cleveland boy.
I’m probably going to wait to buy this one, but that has nothing to do with Mr. Stashower, and more to do with the fact that I’ve read a fair amount about Eliot Ness and the hunt for the torso murderer. That includes a good write-up in Bill James’s Popular Crime and (I think) the original version of In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders.
On the lighter side, Field of Schemes has a good piece up on the quest for a new Browns stadium:
As I’ve said before, FoS runs a little left for my taste, but the one thing we agree on is opposition to giving money to sports teams.
(For the record, my Cleveland relatives who are sports fans informed me that they have given up on the Browns this year, as they are completely disgusted with their handling of the Watson debacle. I think this also means I can make jokes about the Browns without feeling guilty.)
This is stretching the definition of “Cleveland content” a little bit: Cedar Point is about an hour from Cleveland, but that’s close enough that a good number of Clevelanders go there. Anyway, Cedar Point is shutting down the Top Thrill Dragster coaster.
The Top Thrill Dragster gained fame for reaching speeds of 120 mph in just 3.8 seconds…
At the time it opened in 2003, it was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. But it was later eclipsed by the Kingda Ka ride at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.
The coaster had been closed since last August, after a woman was badly injured. Top Thrill Dragster entry on Wikipedia.
Obit watch: September 2, 2022.
Friday, September 2nd, 2022Earnie Shavers, boxer.
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Lauded by his opponents for his overwhelming power, Shavers fought in two heavyweight title fights, suffering defeats in each. In 1977, he lost to Muhammad Ali for the WBA and WBC belts at Madison Square Garden via unanimous decision, but earned the GOAT’s praise after the bout.
“Earnie hit me so hard, it shook my kinfolk in Africa,” Ali said after the fight.
I am seeing reports that Frank Drake, noted astronomer (famous for the Drake Equation) has died, but I don’t have a reliable source to link to.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author. (Nickel and Dimed.)