As promised yesterday, my best effort today riding the bus to and from work to get Walter Mosley's latest, Little Green, back to the library to stop the overdue charges from piling up. Leaving the books to return with some cash, and big cash to pick up my fall wardrobe with my at home menfolk tomorrow, I can focus all my tension on one spot: the likely chance that my scorers will not finish review grant applications by the 18th. I will get not only gray hair but ulcers from this potential failure.
On to Little Green ... unlike J D Robb whose "in death" series I can no longer finish, there is something about Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries that is always fresh, violent, racial but fresh. Mosley has a clear, authentic voice for place and time and although I find it alien, it is believable. Easy has certain primitive ethics that are never breached given drugs, crimes, seedy friends as well as antagonists.
Little Green is a dupe, a pawn, against whom the turmoil of late 60s California hiipiedom is played out. Drug money, free love, and subcultures of opportunistic sellers and changing family values is played out. Easy himself is broken and more than half dead as the story unfolds. He recovers to find his key value is maintaining a family structure, a sort of last ditch Daniel Patrick Moynahan quest before the ghetto culture completely dissolves into fatherless homes, drug dealing, pimping and gang violence. As bleak as this story is, the reader knows it will only get worse and Easy and his side kick Mouse for all their abilities to dodge bullets and best bad guys are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of their decade.
On page 163, Mosley succinctly describes the voice, culture and fears of his heritage: " He and ,I as different as we were in age and temperament. had been reared in the same atmosphere: the ether of perpetual vulnerability and subsequent lifelong fear. Black people in America at that time, and all the way back to our first conveyance, the slave ship, had received common traits. From the so-called white man, these attributes were merely hair texture, skin color, and other physical characteristics. But our true inheritance was the fear of being notices, and worrying about everything from rain collapsing the walls around us to the casual glance that might lead to lynching. We -- almost every black man, woman, and child in America -- inherited anxieties like others received red hair or blue eyes."
Easy and Mouse's and many supporting characters share this common DNA and express their actions as dominant genes
Monday, September 9, 2013
Sunday, September 8, 2013
I Can't be a Slacker, but I am a Recluse
Well, I will write two abbreviated book reviews and a longer apologia.
Goodness knows how much I owe the library, I've had these books forever. First is Hallucinations which I'm counting as one of my one word title themed list. I finished it so long ago, it seems like something I made up, something shadowy and vaguely remembers, ha. It is by Oliver Sacks of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat fame, in case you ever saw the movie, I didn't.
As I was struggling to find an ounce of sympathy or compassion for the various grant applications I was reading this week, I told my young staff that I only worked six months at Mental Health, glibly saying you had to be crazy to work there. Similarly, I was comparing the people I cross paths with at Substance Abuse with former evangelical users. So to seems dear Oliver, trying to credential himself by detailing all the Timothy Leary like drug adventures he had while in medical school. He is not scientific nor erudite and I feel I got no insight whatsoever from reading this book about people who see things.
OK one bad one down. The next that I finished today waiting interminably at the mani-pedi shop is Life Time by Liza Marklund. She is another Scandanavian author who I reckon is riding the coattails of Dragon Tatoo. Once again, I skip over every town and avenue name that is meaningless to me, not wanting to learn anything geographic about Sweden. There was some curiosity in me wanting to see if she could do anything new with the parallel lives structure of novels. She didn't. In fact, it all seemed too rushed and phony at the ending. Was Nancy Drew better or was I too naive at 12?
My reason for not blogging in weeks, nay, months, is work. I come home not wanting to type anything else on the computer after doing so nonstop from 8 to whenever. Nor have I wanted to read after rushing through 240 applications, determining that more than half of them were not ours anyway. So what free time I've had has been devoted to mindless pulling out of crab grass or scraping moss of brick pathways, anything to empty my head of conscientious thought.
Alas, it is now fall. The football pool is back, my menfolk glued to the television for days on end watching MLB and football; I have to wear a coat walking the dog and waiting for the bus; and it's back to making soup for easy weekday meals, first of the season, to use up the glut of tomatoes from co-workers and neighbors.
So, my own Life Time is equally dull and cyclical. On to the latest Walter Moseley which is also seriously overdue.
Goodness knows how much I owe the library, I've had these books forever. First is Hallucinations which I'm counting as one of my one word title themed list. I finished it so long ago, it seems like something I made up, something shadowy and vaguely remembers, ha. It is by Oliver Sacks of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat fame, in case you ever saw the movie, I didn't.
As I was struggling to find an ounce of sympathy or compassion for the various grant applications I was reading this week, I told my young staff that I only worked six months at Mental Health, glibly saying you had to be crazy to work there. Similarly, I was comparing the people I cross paths with at Substance Abuse with former evangelical users. So to seems dear Oliver, trying to credential himself by detailing all the Timothy Leary like drug adventures he had while in medical school. He is not scientific nor erudite and I feel I got no insight whatsoever from reading this book about people who see things.
OK one bad one down. The next that I finished today waiting interminably at the mani-pedi shop is Life Time by Liza Marklund. She is another Scandanavian author who I reckon is riding the coattails of Dragon Tatoo. Once again, I skip over every town and avenue name that is meaningless to me, not wanting to learn anything geographic about Sweden. There was some curiosity in me wanting to see if she could do anything new with the parallel lives structure of novels. She didn't. In fact, it all seemed too rushed and phony at the ending. Was Nancy Drew better or was I too naive at 12?
My reason for not blogging in weeks, nay, months, is work. I come home not wanting to type anything else on the computer after doing so nonstop from 8 to whenever. Nor have I wanted to read after rushing through 240 applications, determining that more than half of them were not ours anyway. So what free time I've had has been devoted to mindless pulling out of crab grass or scraping moss of brick pathways, anything to empty my head of conscientious thought.
Alas, it is now fall. The football pool is back, my menfolk glued to the television for days on end watching MLB and football; I have to wear a coat walking the dog and waiting for the bus; and it's back to making soup for easy weekday meals, first of the season, to use up the glut of tomatoes from co-workers and neighbors.
So, my own Life Time is equally dull and cyclical. On to the latest Walter Moseley which is also seriously overdue.
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