Truly Great Music for a Quarter When I bought my car (for about half the blue book value) the things I liked were things people generally didn't like: standard shift, crank windows and manual door locks. I hate having to turn on the car to close the windows or unlock the doors. Also it has an audio tape player, which nobody wants these days.

That means that I can find audio tapes for a quarter while other people are paying fifteen bucks for a CD. I have a great Mel Torme-George Shearing tape, an early Frank Sinatra tape, a Benny Goodman tape, a Tony Bennett tape, all for a dollar (25 cents each). I got four hours of Ella Fitzgerald for a buck.

I've had great fun with tapes from Bob and Ray, the Green Hornet, and Dragnet, all for a quarter.

I'm also getting great value for vinyl albums which go for a buck. I don't buy albums with scratches, even tiny scratches, yet I have three Les Paul/ Mary Ford albums, a Frank Sinatra/Carlos Jobim album, lots of Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Kris Kristoffersen, Roger Miller, Skeeter Davis, Mother Maybelle, you name it, as well as Peter and Gordon's first album, which, I confess, I don't listen to much, though it has archival value. Like my Woody Allen jazz album.

I also have a lot of Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Hank Williams. All mint condition. Virtually unplayed. Just last week I bought a massive swing collection for all the years from 1937 to 1945. It cost nothing. Had I not showed up it would have gone to the dump.

So my advice is get a tape player and a turntable and enjoy great music for a quarter or a dollar, or nothing.  ¶ 8:33 PM 0 comments

  Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Who is this person? I'm not at liberty to say. Did she accompany her singing dog at the Really Big Show? I couldn't possibly comment. Did she kill a guy and kiss a girl on stage? I am not the person to ask.

I do have one thing to say, however, to anyone who refers to her as a "plus-size" person:

"You better smile when you say that, stranger."

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  My New Career
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  Sex and the City   ¶ 8:39 PM 0 comments

  Reclaiming the Party of Lincoln I posted this entry before, but I'm posting it again, with a postscript.

The founding principle of this blog has always been that it's not about me, but about the books. That's a good principle, but as my great friend Archie Goodwin has said, "There are times when a principle should take a nap."

In the light of recent events, I cannot fail to say to George Bush's corporate masters, "You are damned to hell."

You thought you were so cute arranging the election of your puppet to the presidency. And you thought it was really funny when he created a vast pool of desperate unemployed people who would work for you without paid holidays or health insurance. I'm sure you chuckled all the way to the bank.

But your puppet has destroyed the hopes of all humanity for a decent world and you are responsible. The horror and destruction that the future will bring -- it's your fault.

The rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family, including her seven-year-old sister, that's your fault. You did it, and Saint Peter, although he himself betrayed Jesus three times, will not waste two seconds on you. You betray Jesus every day in everything you do, contaminating the environment for your own gain and trampling the hopes of honest workers for a decent life.

Do you expect to blame it all on the slack-jawed moron you selected as your puppet? Everyone knows he has fewer brains than Alfred E. Newman. He's your man. He's doing your bidding and you will be held responsible.

Damn you to hell. I and all the decent people of America are your enemies forever.


Postscript: Let's retake the party of Abraham Lincoln and restore it to his principles. Let's us decent folk start joining the Republican Party all over the country and kick out these morons who start wars for political gain. If you have a purple mohawk, I want YOU to join the Republican Party, and everyone else, too. Think of it as a favor to Honest Abe.

How many friends do you have? Those friends, along with their friends, and you could take over the local Republican Town Committee. You'd be disarming the buttheads who sow hatred all over the world. Interested? email me  ¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments

  Robert Graves, the 800-Pound Gorilla










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  So When Did Hank Pass Away?
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  Three Teens Who Conquered the World In March of 44 BC a young guy named Octavian was waiting for his great uncle in a place called Appollonia on the Adriatic Coast of Greece. He had become a trusted agent of his uncle, who was assembling Roman legions in Greece in preparation for a campaign against the Parthians in what is now Iraq.

The Pathians had recently slaughtered a couple of Roman legions led by the ultimate butthead Marcus Crassus, who invaded Iraq to advance his own military reputation, and died there along with his ill-fated legions.

Anyway, Octavian and his uncle, they were going to go and retrieve the captured golden eagles that were emblematic of these legions, little mementoes that the Romans were loathe to part with. I don't think there's any doubt they could have brought it off. They didn't, though.

Octavian's uncle Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on the floor of the Senate. Good news for the Parthians.

Octavian is at a loss what to do. The legions stationed around Appollonia, loyal to Caesar, urge him to stay with them for protection. Then Octavian learns he has been named Caesar's heir. His mother urges him to renounce the inheritance, but Octavian, then 19 years old, met with old friends of his uncle, who were loaded, and he called on his two buddies Agrippa and Maecenas, and decided to go to Rome, alone and unarmed, to ask for his inheritance.

Agrippa, the non-aristocratic Italian was a military genius and Maecenas, from an ancient Etruscan family, was a consummate diplomat. It was a nasty, bloody business, mostly due to the stupidity and vanity of Marc Antony (and Caesar's assassins), but these three teenagers conquered the Mediterranean World and founded an empire that lasted more than a thousand years.

I've just been reading a personal profile of Augustus by Anthony Everitt that does a great job with the limited sources available.  ¶ 8:22 PM 0 comments

  Continental Drift - A Literary Home Run Continental Drift by Russell Banks doesn't show up at yard sales too much. It's a book people hold onto. Don't tell anyone I said this, but it's definitely worth buying at a bookstore. In fiction classes I learned that the goal of fiction was to make the reader hear, taste, smell, but above all, see. Russell Banks makes the reader feel.

It's like Hemingway, in that it is fiction that brings you face to face with truth. But in Banks' books the narrator is a little more removed and a little more omniscient, and there's a little more lyricism -- but not too much!

Two of his other books, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction were made into movies that won numerous Oscars. Yet for complicated reasons Continental Drift was never made into a movie. I kept waiting for it to be made while Ted Williams was alive, because he figures briefly in the plot.

Then Ted Williams died and his son had his body frozen so he could use it for cloning, and the whole thing became completely surreal. He wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over his favorite fishing ground in Florida, but his head and body are now stored in separate containers in a cryonics lab in Arizona. You couldn't make this stuff up.

But the part about Ted Williams was the best part of Continental Drift for me. It was really funny, juxtaposed as it was with the other disastrous events in the life of hapless Bob Dubois.

In the opening scene, in a New Hampshire town called Catamount, that I figure is Claremont, but you'd have to ask Russell, Bob Dubois is pricing skates for his two daughters and it makes him so mad he goes and busts out the windows in his truck.

He winds up moving to Florida at the suggestion of his brother-in-law, and people say to him, "You're going to Florida. Maybe you'll see Ted Williams." Anywhere in the Greater Boston area, at that time, you would hear the same thing. Back in the 50s Baseball's Splendid Splinter retired to Florida to fish and play golf.

And then much later, Bob is getting frustrated and he trashes his trailer in Florida and takes off in the truck and goes to some store and... There's Ted Williams!

Bob looks at him and says, "You're Ted Williams!" And Ted Williams already knows this and doesn't say anything. Perfect.

Continental Drift also includes the story of two refugees from Haiti whose lives intersect with old Bob Dubois. Does Banks get it right? Here's a review from a Haitian American:

"As a Haitian American, I had a serious problem with the second main story (especially because of Banks' fine style), Claude and Vanise's story. I wept. It was fiction, but I wept. I remembered how I came here as a small boy. I remembered what happened to my mother, but I won't go into that. And I was angry because Mr. Banks is not Haitian. I kept waiting for him to get it wrong -- there were some stereotypical things, but they were minor. This is the story I kept wishing someone would write."

Anthony Hopkins, James Coburn and Nick Nolte have all given Oscar level performances in Russell Banks movies. That has to say something about the books. I can't wait for the movie of his prison book, Rule of the Bone. And I still have high hopes to see a movie of Continental Drift, a beautiful book about people seeking a better life.  ¶ 8:15 PM 0 comments

  The Forgotten War What a great find for a quarter! King Philip's War: America's Forgotten Conflict by Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias. I have been deeply engaged in this book because there is so much here to ruminate upon, so much that could be applied to other conflicts around the world.

The great Sachem Massassoit is pictured at the emblematic First Thanksgiving. If he had not helped the Plymouth Colony with food and information, they would have died. Yet the inhabitants of the Plymouth Colony put his son's head on a stick and displayed it for twenty years at a prominent crossroads in their town.

King Philip's War, which is never given more than a paragraph in any modern history book, was the war in which most New England Indians, from Maine to Rhode Island, were exterminated. Indian women and children who tried to surrender were slaughtered. The Indians were brutal, too, but at least they took captives.

It was caused by the buttheads who were in charge of the Plymouth Colony, who wanted King Philip's land. They harassed and terrorized him until he had no choice. These buttheads, through their greed, provoked a war that caused thousands of deaths from Maine to Rhode Island.

In fact the Rhode Islanders, outcasts from Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, who had always been on good terms with the Indians, suffered as much or more as the acquisitive butthead colonists who started the war on purpose. Providence was burned to the ground. There was no room for friendship.

The so-called "Praying Indians," Christian Indians who helped the English colonists win the war? They lost their right to hold property and were shipped off to locations where many died and the rest had to flee.

If it weren't for the European-borne plagues that had reduced the native population by about 75 percent in the previous generation, many times the devastation of the Black Plague in Europe, the war might have come out differently. And we'd be better off if it had, because the paradigm of extermination set down in King Philip's War was repeated again and again and again.

That's why it's been forgotten in the textbooks. It's just so hard to deal with. We'd much rather tell our children nice things about the English colonists and have stupid little pageants about the First Thanksgiving.  ¶ 8:55 PM 0 comments

  The Girl From Peyton Place Excuse me, but I have to crow about a tag sale find. I picked up a copy of The Girl from Peyton Place by George Metalious, with somebody or other. Normally you have to view with some skepticism what an ex-husband says, but I believe this book is completely on the level.

He says he was riding his bike one day and he had an idea for Grace, an aspiring author who had had one book rejected -- to really rip the lid off and talk all about a woman's view of sex from high school on. If you credit his account, as I do, she took the idea and ran with it.

If you question his account, then she got the idea from somewhere else or came up with it herself, but her dedication reads: "To George, for all the reasons he knows."

In any case, she ran with it. Peyton Place didn't just sell a lot of copies. It sold more copies than anyone thought you could possibly sell. I collect Grace Metalious, and most of the copies I have are from the 19th or 23d printing.

She sat down at her kitchen table, like Harriet Beecher Stowe in her day, and she transformed the national consciousness. She lifted the veil on child sexual abuse. A lot of people wax poetic about the good old days, meaning, "the days when we didn't hear about this kind of thing."

The rape of Selena Cross and the vengeance she metes out with a fireplace poker on her stepfather, the loathesome Lucas Cross, should be considered a breakthrough in American literature , and in the literature of the world, a world in denial.

And, it turns out, in Grace's original manuscript, Lucas is not her stepfather, but her natural father. The publishers asked Grace to change it and she said, "Sure."

America wasn't ready for the full truth, back then. Remember, this was a time when you couldn't say "pregnant" on television.

But I believe Peyton Place opened the door for many, many thousands of victims of sexual abuse that the public didn't want to know about. And without question it gave women all over the world a validation of their experience and a call to come forward with their own stories.

That's why I love Grace Metalious. Now, was she a nice person? Well actually she was a pretty serious drunk, like Faulkner, so that question kind of becomes moot. I guess we'll never know. But did George love her and did she love George, from the time when they were little kids? All the evidence points to yes, yes, yes.

I'm just saying, if you see a copy of this book, snatch it up. It tells the tale of a book that literally transformed the consciousness of the US of A.  ¶ 10:08 PM 0 comments