We embrace the law,
its familiar lines and
contours providing
comfort and assurance
in a world often gone
mad. And yet our hope,
our inheritance, is not
by law but by a promise,
the promise made
to the offspring. Yet
the law does not
contradict the promise,
nor does it codify
the promise. Rather,
it points.
Photograph by Kaleb Tapp via Unsplash. Used with permission.
He’s been assigned a new detective sergeant, D.S. Charlotte West. His experience is matched only by her inexperience, and yet they find ways to work together on a particularly challenging case.
A man has gone missing. He worked at a local pub, and he never missed a day. But now he’s been gone a week, without a word.
Munro and West look into it, and even visit his home. But there are precious few leads, other than he’d been seen with a petite woman in a cardigan and knitted cap.
Pete Brassett
Munro often works by instinct; in fact, he comes to rely on it. He and West return to the man’s home, and this time they find him – chopped into pieces and hidden behind a false panel. Now it’s a murder investigation, one that gets complicated by a second body being found.
She by Pete Brassett is the first in the Munro & West mystery series, and the author lets the reader know early on what’s happening. That’s because chapters alternate between the investigation and the musings of one of the killers involved. Far from giving the story away, Brassett makes it more terrifying, building up suspense through the very end of the book.
Brassett, a native Scot, has published 10 novels in the Munro and West series, as well as a number of general fiction and mystery titles.
She is a psychological mystery, unsettling as it climbs inside the mind of a killer who looks at brutal serial deaths without remorse, all the while knowing that the murders are flat-out wrong.
When they left for mission service, partisan feeling in the United States could run high – for example, the 1824 presidential election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson was bitterly contested and controversial. But what had not yet emerged was what would become the defining, and intractably dividing, issue of the 1850s and 1860s – slavery. When they returned in 1852, the United States seemed a very different place, one that was increasingly not united.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
I should say up front that I belong to an old school of literature. I was not an English major, but I sat with them through two semesters of English Lit in college, while 99.999 percent of the other students took the general, mainly American, required literature courses. My two-volume Norton Anthology of English Literature, now more than half a century old, sits on a bookshelf, complete with my underlines and marginal scribblings still there. I still use it my Norton as a reference, and I may ask to have it buried with me when the time comes. I even have my textbook from high school senior English, and I still use it as a reference.
My mid-term exam in second semester English lit was three pages of lines and phrases from the poetry of John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelly and George Lord Byron – and I had to identify the author of each line or fragment. Some of the English majors flunked the exam. No one got an A. I was downright thrilled to get a B-.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Garshin’s entire literary output consists of art exhibition reviews published in newspapers and 20 short stories published in one volume. The stories may be few in number, but they are wonderful works of experience, empathy, and observation. They’ve been published together as The Signal and Selected Stories.
I started reading Garshin’s stories without knowing anything about the author except that he died at 33. By the time I reached the second story, entitled “Four Days” and one of the author’s best known works, I knew he’d been a military veteran and had fought in a war. He had indeed; it was the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which involved several Eastern European countries and Russia against the Ottoman Empire. (The European countries were fighting against Ottoman oppression; Russia was hoping to regain territory it had lost in the Crimean War (1853-1856).
“Four Days” may be the short Russian answer from the Russo-Turkish War to Erick Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front about World War I. A Russian soldier lies seriously wounded, forgotten by his comrades. And he lies next to a dead Turkish soldier, whose supplies keep the Russian alive and whose presence keeps the Russian from losing his mind. And what transpires is an understanding that two young men, trying to do their duty, were caught up in a terrible conflict.
Vsevolod Garshin
“The title story, “The Signal,” concerns the life of railroad signalmen. These were the men who, living near the rail lines, signaled open or busy lines to train engineers. One young signalman becomes disenchanted and angry with his treatment by the supervisor, and he decides to do something drastic in retaliation.
Other stories concern young men waiting to be called up for military service; love stories; stories of frustrated love, where a young man to get the attention of a nurse he’s infatuated with becomes deathly ill; and other things. Several of the stories remind me of the short stories of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who often wrote about military themes. Written 70 and 80 years after Garshin, Solzhenitsyn’s stories often have the same sense of fate and surprise twists at the end.
Garshin died of injuries from an attempted suicide; he threw himself down a flight of stone stairs. He had previously had mental problems. And yet his stories are clearheaded, straightforward narratives. He knew war, and he knew people, and it’s unfortunate that he died so young and with a small if insightful body of work.
We come together at the table,
the common table, shared
by all, the table where
diversity becomes unity,
sharing bread and wine
together in oneness.
And yet, even then.
They arrive to join
the meal, and they see
the inherent contradiction,
the uncleanness, of their
unity, because tradition
and old religious laws
refute this sharing,
deny this togetherness,
reject this unity.
Those who know better,
know the old has been
set aside, separate
themselves as of old,
fearful of the condemnation
of men, fearful of losing
their reputation and
position. Even though
they know they are free,
they shackle themselves,
once again.
Photograph by Mona Masoumi via Unsplash. Used with permission.
It’s been hard to look anywhere on social media or the news media and not see a story about artificial intelligence (AI), and how Microsoft has integrated into ChapGPT. Some of the best commentary I’ve seen, interestingly enough, is from people of faith. Clint Archer at The Cripplegate says AI is here, and we’re seeing its precocious adolescence. Jeremy Pierre at The Gospel Coalition asks whether students should use AI for writing assignments.
I’m old enough to remember what happened when Daniel Ellsberg leaked what came to be called the Pentagon Papers; in fact, I was in journalism school. And there have been a number of spectacular disclosures since then – Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Wikileaks, to mention some fairly recent ones. Historically, the news media applauded and supported such disclosures. Then came two voluntary disclosures: Elon Musk and the Twitter files, and Tucker Carlson and the Jan. 6 videotapes. Both of those ran afoul of the prevailing media narrative (and there is a prevailing media narrative). Freddy Gray at The Spectator says that Tucker Carlson’s biggest crime was doing good journalism.
More Good Reads
British Stuff
St. Clement Danes – A Historic Strand Landmark – A London Inheritance.
Poetry
Things Worth Remembering: W. H. Auden’s Poignant Embrace – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.
Crucifixion – Anna Akhmatova at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).
Lean on Him – Warren Bonham at Society of Classical Poets.
Life and Culture
Thomas Jefferson and the Smoothening of the American Mind – Douglas Murray at The Spectator.
Unpopular, Polarizing, and Ineffective: Affirmative action’s days may finally be numbered – Jason Riley at CityJournal.
Cornmeal and Butter: On the Significance of Temperature – Ethan Mannon at Front Porch Republic.
American Stuff
A Different Fight: The Insurance Writings of General Gustavus Woodson Smith – Karl Miller at Emerging Civil War.
The Women’s Tea Parties – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.
Writing and Literature
Blurred Lines: When a Novel’s Author Is Also Its Narrator – William Landay at CrimeReads.
In defense of narrative history: Stories make scholarship human – Charlotte Gauthier at The Critic.
Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite – a previously unpublished short story by Tennessee Williams at Conjunctions.
Faith
Love Is – Vanessa Le at Gentle Reformation.
News Media
Elon Musk Outlines His Vision for Twitter at Morgan Stanley Tech Conference – Andrew Hutchinson at Social Media Today.
May It Be (Enya / Lord of the Rings) – Voces8
