Blithe Spirit, the Blog

Chi Trib books section, demoted some time back to a Saturday feature and on a diet with other book sections in recent years, repays rather close attention, I am finding in recent weeks.  Today, for instance, It talks up a mystery book about Chicago written not in recent years at all:

Sixty years ago, Chicago newspaper writer Fredric Brown, a Gary teenager who’d started his career as a proofreader on a Milwaukee paper, won an Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. His book was “The Fabulous Clipjoint,” and it’s still considered one of the best crime novels about Chicago.

The reviewer, Dick Adler, reviews crime fiction for Publishers Weekly and other publications and blogs at The Knowledgeable Blogger, “for lovers of crime fiction — which he’d better update, since it calls him “a former” reviewer” for the Trib.

I have already ordered The Fabulous Clipjoint — set in the Tip Top Tap, atop the Allerton hotel on Boul Mich in 1948 at the latest — from ABE Books.  The book aims to “preserve forever, like bugs in amber, the seedy pleasures of our shared pasts,” Adler tells us — invitingly to a Chicagoan who was then in his late ‘teens.

 ”We walked north two blocks on the east side of Michigan Boulevard to the Allerton Hotel. . . . The top floor was a very swanky cocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that, the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace. We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. . . . ‘Beautiful as hell,’ I said. But it’s a clipjoint.”

That sort of stuff is not great, but it’s clean and clear.  So is Adler’s discussion of it:

Ed [one of two prime protagonists] knows he has to find out what happened [to his murdered father] but can’t do it himself. So he heads for Janesville, Wis., where the J.C. Hobart carnival is doing business and looks up his uncle, Ambrose Hunter, a barker and roustabout who is the smartest man Ed has ever met. They head back to Chicago, where they pick up Wally’s trail, bribe a friendly detective, act like tough guys (not easy for the boyish Ed or the short and tubby Am), meet a swell dame who loves Ed and lies to him, and actually solve the murder.

Adler sold me, and his brief account of Frederic Brown’s writing life — “a man who often told his wife he hated writing” — did the same for a man he compares to Hammett “and other crime icons.”  I look forward to the ABE copy, which I’m getting for under $5, shipped.  An excellent service, that.

Sunday Sermons . . .

. . . and Weekday Observations

First Sunday of Lent, A-cycle:

A story of ingratitude: Adam and Eve had everything, under one condition — enjoy your garden except for that tree. Along came a talking serpent who persuaded them to violate the condition, or persuaded Eve, who found Adam an easy mark, her co-conspirator in the betrayal of the whole human race.

They did not know how good they had it, were insufficiently grateful for their situation. She and he listened to the con man singing a siren song and lost everything. Men have jumped off buildings for lesser catastrophes.

But the Supreme Giver, fully entitled to keep his angry word, backed off. The serpent would be thwarted. Good times would return. He would not forever be angry, which is where Jesus would come in, as Paul elucidates . . .

* [Bonus sermon:] Fourth Sunday in ordinary time, per Roman Catholic practice, but 4th after Epiphany per Episcopal Church U.S. practice, which I prefer.

This veers dangerously close to boilerplate goo-gooism, even with utopia-rejection.  Don’t judge a book by its review, but this one sounds like bad poetry.

(More like this at Blithe Spirit, Commentary and Home for Unpremeditated Art)

This book-writing lady did a bad thing, per U. of N. Carolina-Greensboro prof David A. Cook, in a letter to Times [of London] Literary Supplement 1/4/08:

In 1972, I was preparing to write an essay on [John Cowper] Powys’s Owen Glendower (1940), a two-volume, massively researched novel of the Welsh prince’s revolt against Henry IV, and I learned that a historical novel on the same subject had been published that year [1972] by G. P. Putnams.

This was Martha Rofheart’s Fortune Made His Sword (published in 1973 in the UK as Cry God for Harry). I quickly got my hands on a copy to see if Powys and Rofheart had used the same sources, but what I discovered was page after page of verbatim plagiarism. This was no accident: I counted more than a hundred such instances, extending over about 150 pages in the middle of the novel.

Martha gets a respectful hearing elsewhere however, especially at Randolph-Macon College, where an Honors 141 student observed that her 1976 novel The Alexandrian was “fun to read,” being “told from Cleopatra’s voice” and thus “interesting.”  This novel also “allowed the readers to feel like they were Cleopatra.”

That’s nothing.  Writing Fortune Made His Sword made her feel like John Cowper Powys.  It must have been a wonderful experience.

Barnes & Noble is not stocking the #1 Amazon-rated book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, at least in a number of places, east, west, and heartland.  It apparently hits too close to its target.

Haven’t cracked it yet myself but am fascinated by the title, which matches how I feel about so-called liberals.

What to read while double-casted (22 days to go, b.t.w.)?  Try Black Oxen, by Gertrude Atherton, a 1923 novel set in the New York of its day, full of Edith Wharton-style depiction of High Society and also of the day’s “Sophisticates,” namely the newspaper-literary set that has been so long attracted to the big city.

I got Black Oxen — the name is from a line from Yeats about time as inexorable — as a gift through www.abebooks.com, which I recommend as a place to find the hard to find, out of print, etc. at low, low prices.  Atherton as reminder of Edith Wharton fails, however, when we consider this as her only book about New York.  She was a Californian, in fact, and has another novel, of many, called The Californians.

Wharton’s A Backward Glance, her memoirs, nonetheless beckoned when I’d done with Black Oxen, which was demanding as to extended conversations but rewarding as per characterizations and plot suspense.  Those conversations contributed a lot to the suspense.

I also renewed acquaintance with The New Criterion, a 10 times a year highly literate exercise in social, etc. criticism.  More later on this, as on other materials for the shut-in.  . . . .

. . . Father Barron on Beauty, Lady Asquith on Shakespeare

Rev. Robert Barron explored beauty for the Catholic Citizens of Illinois Oct. 12 at the Union League Club; and Clare Asquith, an English viscountess, argued that Shakespeare tried to subvert the Elizabethan anti-Catholic police state.

Read it.

Sir Thomas Browne offered advice for the thinking Christian believer in his Religio Medici (1642), along the way dropping memorable observations:

* The wisedom [sic] of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a grosse simplicity admire his workes; those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration. (Part I, Section 13)

I like that “devout and learned admiration.”  He is describing a 1950s Jesuit approach to learning and religion and I suppose one of 2000s too.

Speaking of us, our persons:

[We] are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse volume.  (I,16)

It’s the “bold and adventurous piece of nature” I have in mind here.

He looks to nature, “that bold and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all . . . the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens,” who have no written Scripture to learn from.  Foolish we are, he says, to “disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.”  Sounds like Wordsworth here.

As to the works of nature, “God is like a skilful Geometrician” who devises “according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art.”  He has in mind God the Artist, operating not in a capricious manner.

So to give all credit to Nature as if it were acting alone is to do it for a hammer or pen for a building or poem.  It is to “let our Hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honors of our writings.” 

And so it is that “Nature is the art of God.”

Not bad stuff, I say, bespeaking a simple faith which many in our churches embrace.  And many’s the preacher who could quote this fellow.

In his review of S.A. Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard) in the 6/22/07 Times Lit Supplement, Paul Seabright, U. of Toulouse econ prof and author of The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life, 2004, accepts V’s assessment of rampant intelligence among S. Side Chi residents (dubious tho it may be) but notes the non-transferability of the skills by which they survive.

Much of their capital turns out to be highly personalized, dependent on their network of contacts and loyalties, on favours given and returned, and to have little or no value to anyone who tries to set up in a different city or even a different neighbourhood.  People are risk-averse, and the neighbourhood is an informal insurance system, so it takes an unusual degree of self- assurance to take the gamble of leaving.

He asks what would help, for instance, more or less regulation of “labor markets.”

After all, regular jobs at the minimum wage are a luxury here, so does this make the minimum wage an irrelevance, or is it a part of the problem?

I have my strongly held opinion in this matter, having embraced the teaching of F.A. Hayek in these matters.  Even without it, however, Wal-Mart wages seem irrelevant in this situation, as opposed to legislated ones.  The starving man is glad for bread, and telling him to eat cake for the sake of union power is not a good idea.

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Coming up on the St. Sabina RC parish calendar is Bible class by televangelist Tommy Tenney, of Godchasers Network, tonight at 7.  Tenney is a white guy out of Pinevilla, LA.  It is not surprising that he’s not RC, which I presume he is not, because with all its protesting and marching and hosting Dem pols and other demagogs in the pulpit, St. Sabina is a Bible church.

That is, most of its members are black church-goers, which means mostly evangelical-oriented.  When the irrepressible, undigestable Al Sharpton mounted the pulpit a few years back for a largely political harangue, the packed church included people who consulted their Bibles, not their missals, during the service.  Pfleger is successful because he plays not only to black social concerns but also to their Bible orientation.

In this he isn’t out of sync with Things Catholic, where The Word has come to equal if not supersede The Sacrifice in importance.  He just goes at it more vigorously.  I’m sure this Tenney fellow is a boffo performer.  And I’d like to say the same for more Catholic preachers and teachers.

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“Thank you, Christopher,” Hugh McDiarmid’s wife wrote him, using his real name, after he’d written a glowing poem about her, he having been a very difficult husband for many years.  “Always remember . . . I love you and only you.”  But she added, pointedly and poignantly, “ . . . and could have been so very much more if you’d only let me.”

This from her letters to him, edited by Beth Junor, in a TLS review 8/10/07.

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In his review of DESIRING ROME. Male subjectivity and reading Ovid’s “Fasti” (Ohio State) in TLS 6/8/07, T.P. Wiseman skewers author Richard J. King for characterizing Ovid as “submissive, feminized and, of course, symbolically castrated” (Wiseman’s words).

“If psychoanalysis has a value,” Wiseman writes of such a treatment, “it is surely therapeutic. There seems little point in attempting it on a man who has been dead for nearly two millennia.”

I’d say so.

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And finally, world population growth since the 1950s has been not from people “breeding like rabbits” but from their no longer “dying like flies,” says an unnamed UN advisor quoted by Bjorn Lomborg in his Skeptical Environmentalist.  You can remember something like that.  All things being equal, a simile works better than a metaphor.

* Christopher Smart, in his 1751 poem, “An epigram of Sir Thomas More, imitated,” has a man kissing Dorinda, whom he playfully tells her nose is too big.

At which Dorinda, “equally to fun inclined,” placed “her lovely Lily hand behind./ ‘Here, Swain,’ she cried; ‘Mayst thou securely kiss,/ Where there’s no nose to interrupt thy bliss.’”

Right here, Bud.

* The academic (not athletic) racial achievement gap at one Oak Park K-6 school was said to be “more unique” than at other schools — by its principal.

Is she more unique than other principals?

* A book I am working through is The Roots of National Socialism, by Rohan D’O. Butler (Dutton, 1942). It would be good reading for others, I think, especially by young folks who do not know Naziism was socialism — national socialism, as opposed to the international version run out of a building in Moscow.

The roots in question are heavily philosophical. The book is a tour de force showing the consequences had by ideas.

* We routinely object to senseless violence (it’s a consecrated phrase), but when do we hear praise for sensible violence?

On the football field is one place, but no guns allowed.  The Bears’ Tank Johnson has done his time for gun violations and is suspended for several games at considerable monetary loss. I am assuming he had to promise not to go armed onto the field.