Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Here’s where my thoughts go.

Thinking About Thinking #30 – Back to Blood – In a melting pot, what melts, exactly?

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In his novel Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe savages urban American morality, or lack thereof, by focusing on the melting pot of Miami.

In this city there are more recent immigrants than anywhere else. The races cohabit and wheel and deal, but they mix hardly at all. As one of his characters quips, Everybody hates everybody.

Wolfe’s main character here is Nestor Camacho, a roguish cop of Cuban ancestry who, like so many of his neighbors in Hialeah, barely speaks a word of Spanish. In many ways, Camacho is a hero, often in spite of himself. His good heart and fierce sense of duty carry him into dangerous situations, intrigues, and trouble with his superiors. The driving force of a subplot about a colossal art forgery is preppie newspaperman John Smith, who is also a rogue, and also prone to find all kinds of trouble, much of it newsworthy. And most of the truths he uncovers are inconvenient both for his media bosses and for the mob-style rulers of the social order.

This book shows a lot of skin, as they say. Situations are weird or gross, or both. Wolfe reveals himself to be a dirty old man with a massive vocabulary who will titillate you until you have way too much information. We are self-seeking animals, he seems to say, and most of our decisions and actions are motivated by our most basic desires.

Tom Wolfe’s literary predecessor could well be the nineteenth-century French satirist Honoré de Balzac, who was so alike in his low opinion of human nature and exploitation of its foibles. At heart, Wolfe is a curmudgeonly moralist. Society, he seems to be saying, still needs cops and journalists, who can occasionally be heroes, if they dare to break the rules.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #29 – The Art Thief – Stealing art from the rich – victimless?

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In novels and movies about jewel thieves, the burglar is a lovable rogue.

Noah Charney is a professor of art history and an expert in fine art forgery and theft. And in this novel he proves himself to be a sly spinner of detective yarn. The Art Thief is a tale of brain-teasing complexity involving multiple, interconnected forgeries and thefts of historic paintings from several institutions. And its resolution necessarily involves multiple detectives and forensic experts, each as colorful and eccentric in his own way as Inspector Clouseau. The victims – museum curators and aristo collectors – are a classier bunch who tend to both snobbery and hypocrisy – not the most admirable human beings. Classiest of all are the scheming thieves and forgers. You see, in today’s genre fiction, perpetrators of  these presumably victimless crimes against the upper class have the cachet of winners at Wimbledon. Well played, chaps! In a previous generation, this place of honor was held by jewel thieves who connived to execute intricately plotted heists. Remember Cary Grant – never more dashing than in his role as John Robie in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief? Or Melina Mercouri and her artful crew in Topkapi?

Along the way, Prof. Charney is going to teach you a lot about art history and criticism. And that’s even if you consider yourself well versed. He’s never happier or more entertaining than when his donnish characters tear off on rants to their dunderhead students about how to study paintings.
Here’s an example. His Professor Barrow pontificates: “I speak of observation, looking in order to gather information, rather than merely looking. Look deeper. Observation followed by logical deduction leads to solution. You shall see.”

And isn’t this just what the reader of a detective story must learn to do? Observe and deduce?

The Art Thief is great fun, but my advice would be to keep a scratchpad handy. The plots, the players, the crosses and the double-crosses are so intertwined you’ll want to make a diagram to keep track.

  A century-old scandal locked in a painting. This edition of the novel includes the author’s research whitepaper published in The Journal of Art Crime.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #28 – Griftopia – Who Is Getting Away with What?

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Griftopia by Matt Taibbi is a fascinating, ultra-hip, and more or less comprehensible explanation of the financial bubble burst of 2008. It’s a disturbing investigative report. But let’s get real. We need to understand this stuff if we ever want to think and act like a responsible adults instead of brain-dead, wage-slave entertainment addicts.

Did you know that parking meters in Chicago are now owned by offshore investors? And that other big chunks of our municipal- and state-owned infrastructure, like parks, are being auctioned or leased to foreign interests? All because our government budgets are imploding and your friendly investment bankers have the fix – just sell off the US of A in pieces while they take fat commissions on the deals.

If only chronically curious journalist Matt Tiabbi were some crack-head scribbler who made all this stuff up to sell books. If it weren’t the shameful truth, it would make a very funny movie.

 

Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner – Is it a scam? Harry wonders if he’s being played. Then he wonders, Do I mind?

Thinking About Thinking #27 – A Delicate Truth – The Reader As Close Observer

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In telling stories about spies as close observers, John Le Carré taught me how to read – more closely.

Le Carré’s spy novel A Delicate Truth is the behind-the-scenes story of a small anti-terrorist black op  – secretly sponsored by a Member of Parliament – that might or might not have happened. Problem is, its very existence – even as a plan – is so politically incorrect as to be a profound embarrassment if anyone involved decides to break silence and go public with the few facts they know. So the trendy topic of whistle-blowing is very much at issue.

I find two things remarkable about this novel.

First, the dialogue is almost entirely and deliberately off-point – more than in any other Le Carré book I’ve read. The words are about everything but the topic at hand. Everyone speaks, not just in trade jargon and code, but in hints and innuendo and metaphors. It’s annoying. And real. And perhaps an angry commentary on a societal lack of not only frankness and honesty but also an unwillingness to face any real facts at all.

They might be discussing murder, but all you hear are acronyms.

Second, you won’t have a clear idea of who the main character is until fairly far along. He will grow on you, as he will become bolder in his own estimation of himself. But he’s a bureaucrat (as are most of the rest of them) and in many respects lackluster. Totally absent are the mythic proportions of James Bond. And he has nothing like the cunning wit or the cleverness of George Smiley.

He does, however, eventually realize he has a conscience and a loyalty to ideals that are both naive and reckless.

Master spy novelist Le Carré often refers to intelligence operatives as close observers. Of course, that’s just what a reader is. His narrative technique is to immerse you in detail, much of which may be irrelevant to the plot – just the way we experience reality every day, from one perception to the next.

In training you to think like a spy – like a close observer – Le Carré makes you a better reader and a more critical thinker.

A Delicate Truth is very much about today. And there is much to learn, if in those cryptic conversations you also learn to listen between the lines.

Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner – Intrigue on the white sands of East Africa for fans of Graham Greene and John Le Carré.

No, I’m not Marty. But I was The Playboy!

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Author Gerald Everett Jones is sometimes, but not often, mistaken for movie director Martin Scorsese.

While I was on a business trip a few years ago, I was walking down the hallway of my hotel, and two young people passed by me. Moments later I heard a voice behind me as one said to the other, “That’s Martin Scorsese, you know.”

It doesn’t happen often. Of course, perhaps the people who are gaping at me across the room at a crowded restaurant might think they’ve spotted Marty – or there might literally be egg on my face.

This was not the first time I’d been recognized in public by a stranger, whether for being myself or some (other) celebrity. I was surprised and flattered the other day when after introducing myself to a young woman on a business matter and handing her my card, she replied, “I’ve heard of you.”

I was afraid to ask her how!

I once spotted novelist Paul Auster having breakfast at a nearby table at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. I knew he lived in the neighborhood. I regret I didn’t have the nerve to walk over there and tell him how much I admire his work.

Gerald played the title role (Christy Mahon) in a summer-stock production of John M. Synge’s play, Playboy of the Western World.

But the most sensational of these experiences happened decades ago, and I fear it might never be surpassed. When I was the callow age of twenty and thinking someday I’d be a professional actor, I played Christy Mahon, the lead role in J. M. Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World. (I should explain that playboy in the jargon of the period apparently meant something like trickster – nothing like the implication it would eventually have for Hugh Hefner or James Bond.)

I undertook this challenge – a large role for a green actor – during a summer-stock internship at the Town Meeting Playhouse in Jeffersonville, Vermont. Our acting company took on nine roles in ten weeks, performing four shows each weekend, including a matinee as well as an evening show on Saturdays. The schedule was so hectic and compressed that we’d start rehearsals and blocking of the next show every Friday, the day of the current show’s opening night.

During those four performances of Playboy, I forgot my lines a couple of times, but the generous cast helped me ad lib to cover. The applause was enthusiastic, I was told later by the director, and Vermonters are not known for public displays of affection of any kind.

The closest big town to Jeffersonville is Burlington. One afternoon following the closing of Playboy, several of us cast members took a road trip into town. It was a rare day out. And one of the highlights of our spree was stopping in a bookstore.

While I was browsing there, a teenage girl pointed eagerly at me and exclaimed, “Oh, my God! It’s the Playboy of the Western World!”

Gerald Everett Jones is the author of the new novel, Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner, which will be released on June 29.

Books That Make You… (cross-posts)

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BTMY Author Interview

Read more of this interview…

Beach-Bound Book Bash Reading

Gerald’s gig begins at 42:31 for about five minutes – And there are many more captivating  authors on this beach!

Book Review: An Eternal Audience of One by Rémy Ngamije (release date August 10, 2021)

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The Eternal Audience of One book cover

Gallery / Scout Press imprint of Simon & Schuster

The book’s title The Eternal Audience of One would seem to refer to the unrepentant self-centeredness of the young male protagonist Séraphin Turihamwe. At an overview level, focusing on entertainment value, the storytelling is a familiar coming-of-age plot, a series of hookups, mostly casual and a few intense – soft-core graphic. What’s exceptional about author Rémy Ngamije’s version are the intrigues of and insights on sexual, racial, and geopolitical strife in today’s southern Africa. Séraphin was born Rwandan, but his educated family emigrates to Windhoek, Namibia in search of both safety and prosperity. As a result, the label refugee gets appended to him, when he and his family expect to be regarded as residents who deserve a place in the country’s rapidly emerging middle class. But no sooner does overachieving student Séraphin begin to adjust than he decides to attend law school at Remms in Cape Town, South Africa. There he is rapidly thrown into a sophisticated urban environment, along with the predictable pressures of trying to balance the obligations of academic achievement and serious partying.

Cocksure Séraphin, who still harbors secret doubts about his social standing, hangs with a posse of fellow students. These men call themselves the High Lords, facilitating their exploits with liberal rounds of alcohol if not drugs. He has left an Afrikaner girlfriend back home in Windhoek to stumble into a series of hookups with young women who are variously white or black. Although he and his fellows don’t discriminate racially as to their choices in partners, they do share stereotypes among themselves about the characteristics, charms, and preferences of each. For example, a group they call the Benevolent White Girls would not think of sleeping with any of them, but those are avid notetakers in class and are eager to help their black brothers crib. As with Séraphin’s chagrin at being called a refugee, many of his mates, although from indigenous ethnicities in neighboring countries, are regarded as foreigners in Cape Town.

So, it’s mostly partying and texting, along with falling in and out of bed, if not in love. Spoiler alert: chick-magnet Séraphin doesn’t quite settle down by the time the Epilogue wraps, but one can expect, if there is a sequel, it will be set in Windhoek and he will be pleading with the High Lords to stand at his side for the ceremony. Or not?

Harry Harambee's Kenyan Sundowner cover

Releasing June 29, 2021 in trade paperback, Kindle, and EPUB. Audiobook in production.

Thinking About Thinking #26 – The Centaur – How did you make it through high school?

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Here’s my book review of The Centaur, a novel by John Updike. This book’s central metaphor from Greek mythology is that Chyron, the noblest of all the centaurs, took pity on humankind. The man-beast sacrificed himself to appease Zeus.

The Chyron of Updike’s story is George Caldwell, a middle-aged high-school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania. Although Caldwell would seem to be the main character, a lot of the narration is by his teenage son Peter. The lad loves his father but wishes the old man had a higher opinion of himself. George thinks he’s a loser, even though he seems to be beloved by most of his students, even the ones who mock him mercilessly.

The father-son relationship is the core of the book. Mother Cassie isn’t much of a character at all unless you sense the compassion between the lines. There isn’t much mythology in it except in bookend chapters that take us in and out. Updike seems to have done his homework and knows his Greek stories. But how those intertwine with the Caldwell family saga is obscure.

Updike’s legacy has been his Rabbit books, much like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. Updike’s came first. I sampled both and I wasn’t drawn to either. Too cynical, too bitter. Does anyone really care whether middle-class white men experience heartache and disappointment? I admit that’s a sarcastic rhetorical question. I haven’t read them all, but I suspect The Centaur might be John Updike’s best book.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #25 – Can you imagine living in the south of France?

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As we think back over the pleasures and pain of the past year, here’s my review of A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

A bored, urbane London career man inherits a rundown vineyard in the Bordeaux region of France. Fortunately, he speaks fluent French and doesn’t act so English as to be spurned by the locals. His predictable romantic adventures with bucolic hotties are not graphic at all, but the descriptions of his meals at the local bistro border on the pornographic. If reading about artfully prepared food and incredible wines get you excited, this is your book.

The wine, of course, is a topic of infinite variety. I’m familiar with rhapsodic descriptions including tastes of chocolate, berry, and oak, but this is the first time I saw “dirty socks” mentioned in connection with the taste of wine.

There’s a bit of a crime story here, nothing so stressful as to inspire a Hollywood blockbuster. Unanswered questions about the history and lore of this French farming community may pique your interest, like an appetizer course, or what the French call an amuse bouche, a tasty morsel to tease the mouth.

The mystery is not much of a crime. The most violent act involves spitting into a crachoir (a spittoon for wine tasters), which as the Brits might say is a bloody shame, especially if the wine contains just the right hint of dirty sock.

But if in the midst of winter, you’re tempted to escape to the south of France, reading The Good Year is a quick and inexpensive vacation.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #24 – Do you speak the Bard’s English?

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Ever since I learned that Gerald and Shakespeare both mean “spear chucker,” I’ve had a long-standing Jones for the Bard. Quite coincidentally, a colleague recently suggested that I’d enjoy anything written by Bill Bryson. My friend suggested A Walk in the Woods or A Short History of Nearly Everything. The first sounded too much like a mossy travelogue and the ambitious scope of the second seemed far too cumbersome for casual sampling. So Bryson’s biography, Shakespeare: The World As Stage, was the irresistible choice for me.

I can now agree that Bryson may be the most entertaining nonfiction writer I’ve ever read. He dares to be a stylist in these days of plain-vanilla journalism, and that is praiseworthy in itself. Perhaps it’s in the blood: His father was a sportswriter with the flair of an H. L. Menken or a Heywood Hale Broun.

Apparently Bryson was assigned to write Shakespeare as an entry in the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books (a HarperCollins imprint, a News Corporation subsidiary, a Viacom competitor, and a prize possession of Rupert Murdoch et al). Right off, Bryson seems bewildered that so much material has been generated about the most illustrious English dramatist — and most of it on scanty and even nonexistent evidence. You can almost hear Bryson implore, “I got stuck with writing this, now how do I fill a few hundred pages without making stuff up?”

Chandos Portrait of William Shakespeare

He starts by describing the Chandos portrait (shown here), and after tantalizing us with intriguing details about the wealth of the sitter (apparent from the dark clothes, which require lots of expensive dye) to the earring (as rakish on a man then as now), the embarrassed biographer bestows the fact that no one knows whether this most famous likeness is actually the person we’ve been told it is.

Bryson chatters on, quite amusingly, making much ado about nothing as he overturns reams of research. Perhaps because statistics offer some hope of solid evidence, he informs us that Shakespeare’s vocabulary included about 20,000 words. You probably know about 50,000, but today’s world is a more complex place. But — and here’s the astounding factoid — when Shakespeare couldn’t find an appropriate word, he apparently made one up.

In fact, Shakespeare contributed about 800 words to your 50K. Among these coinages are: abstemious, antipathy, assassination, barefaced, critical, eventful, excellent, frugal, indistinguishable, leapfrog, lonely, well-read, zany, and, as Bryson quips, countless others, including countless.

Suffice it to say Shakespeare must have had a fairly deep knowledge of Latin and Romance-language root words and syllables, to so effectively concoct and combine new polysyllabic English ones. Is this more grist for the grinders who allege Shakespeare was in fact someone else? Bryson does not comment specifically, but he does a credible job of debunking various Baconian and Marlovian speculations later in the book.

Shakespeare’s turns of a phrase also enhanced the language. Many of his inventions are cliches of modern speech (Bryson’s compilation): one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father of the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, and foregone conclusion.

The King James Bible was a new translation back then. Most spiritual and scholarly works were still being written in Latin. So the English Bible and Shakespeare’s plays apparently contributed more to our daily discourse than you’d think.

I plan to read lots more Bryson, and thanks to him I now admire William Shakespeare (whoever he was) more than ever.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.