I’d read, a long time ago, that certain things become more important as you age. These included art, as in visiting museums, and family heritage, as in genealogy. I must have read it and dismissed it, so I can’t cite the source, but I later discovered it to be true.
An older cousin researching the family had led her to the old family Bible in my possession. The call became an extended conversation about old family stories, including one about the great-grandmother who allegedly killed a man and got away with it, and the great-grandfather who had reportedly walk home from Virginia at the end of the Civil War (I wrote a novel about that story).
Poet Sarah Carey has taken a related but different approach. She’s written an arresting poetry collection, entitled Bloodstream, about family, heritage, and stories about odd relatives (if you’re from the South, as Carey and I both are, every family has odd relatives. In fact, in the South, odd and relatives may be redundant. She even writes about family pets.
I get amused when I see stories about how entitled Baby Boomers are, or how we supposedly lived the life of Riley back in the 1950s. While there are obvious differences to today – families were far more likely to be intact with both parents living together – it wasn’t all like the television shows Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. John Cochrane at The Coolidge Review explains that the 1950s weren’t such a golden age as many believe today believe.
I’ve known of at least four pastors who read fiction, only because they sent me notes about my own novels. It’s not something we expect, figuring they’re always reading the latest books on theology, church issues, and pastoral counseling. T.N. Suffield has some reasons why it is a good idea for pastors to read fiction.
It’s not a story that the mainstream media will cover, but there’s been a spate of articles about nurses posting on social media about ways to harm ICE agents or Trump supporters in general, including one nurse who posted a really vicious attack on the White House press secretary. That nurse was fired and de-licensed for what she said, so at least sanity prevailed. If you want to read these stories, you can google them; I have no interest in providing links other than to note that mental illness seems to have seriously infiltrated the medical community.
I’m not sure when I first ran across the reference to noir poetry. Several years ago, I read a novel in verse form, The Long Ride by Robin Robertson. I can’t say Robertson was a noir poet so much as he’d written a noir novel as poetry.
Recently, I read another reference, so I decided to find out what it was about. Noir novelists I knew about – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, writer usually associated with crime stories from the 1920s to the 1950s. And noir movies, movies like Notorious, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Maltese Falcon, Strangers on a Train, Laura, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard. (My favorite noir movie, though, was released in 1974 – Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.
I’m trying to remember when I first became interested in Russian history. Most likely, when I was 10, and one of my Christmas presents (my mother knew me) was a Horizon Caravel book entitled Russia Under the Czars. I must have read it a dozen times. And I still have it.
My senior year in high school, I discovered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and hisOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,Cancer Ward, andThe First Circle. In college, I took two semesters of Russian history, and I was glad I knew more about Russia’s past than most people. The professor was a great lecturer; he was also an unapologetic defender of the Soviet regime.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
