...in a quiet way and at an opportune time,

One of my favorite works of fiction is Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs. There's nothing weighty about it, it's just a pleasant little tale of life and love, a trifle that I enjoy because Farrington writes with a sort of breathlessly effortless grace, the kind of writing that makes writing feel easy and natural, as if you could just sit down and crank out that sort of perfectly simple yet perfectly weighted prose any time you want to.

But there's also a deeply sorrowful heart to it, and I remembered why I cried the first time I read it, over a dozen years ago but not long after my daughter Bryn was stillborn. It was this, and I hope Mr. Farrington forgives me quoting him at length.

"She had never allowed herself to grieve wholly before, she realized now. Not for her father, not for her grandparents. Not even for her marriage: she'd never allowed herself to face what it meant to fail in the central relationship of her life. To really remember that shining, innocent love she'd felt and everything that had happened to it. And this was why, of course; because some pragmatic, self-protective sense had told her that grief was bottomless. Skirting this sea, she had dipped her toes in; she'd wondered what would happen if she crossed the line, but it had always seemed that it could only be a kind of defeat, a drowning, a death.

And so it was.

But maybe it was not the end, to be defeated by life. Maybe that was even part of what it meant to be a human being; to recognize the way in which life had finally defeated you, to accept the ways in which death had come, to stop looking away from the failures of love, and to grieve.

To keep your heart open in this sea of silence; to drift in it, surrendering to its currents baffled and without recourse.

And at the bottom of it, to be surprised anew by love's simplicity."

And that's really it. It's a sort of munshin, a letting-go, the simple acceptance of the endlessness of grief, the release of struggle and denial against that suffering of loss. Some things are simply too grievous to be borne, and it is the trying to bear them that crushes you beneath their weight. It is only when you simply sink beneath them to that deep, still darkness that your heart and mind can then accept that that grief is part of you and always will be.

That, just as for the note to be there must be silence before, and after, there must be darkness for there to be light.

Knowing that does not lighten the darkness. But it makes the darkness bearable, a part of life instead of a denial of it.

Bomben los!

As I was writing a comment to the preceding post on marriage and the state, a phrase returned to me from what may have to be one of the most wonderfully written sex scenes I've ever encountered for pure Bulwar-Lyttonesque delight.

The scene is set in the 1940's and takes place in the office of some sort of Allied military satrap. His secretary, who sees him as a skyhook to greater things, is trying to get his, shall we say, attention? She finally pins him down and makes it clear to him that she has other things in mind than increased War Production. Thus:

"'Take me!' she murmured, her lips burning against his ear, 'Oh, God, take me, use me, overwhelm me! Make me yours, ravage me, dominate me, devastate me!"

He bombed her like Schweinfurt."

Now that's entertainment.

Random Stuff from Late at Night

I can't WAIT for the Birthday Season to be over.

Missy's was last weekend, the Peeper's is this weekend, and he's been a real pill, honestly, for about a week and a half, whining about presents, who's getting them (mostly other people) and who isn't (exclusively him).

So we have his birthday do tomorrow although his real advent is this coming Thursday. He'd have freaking exploded if we'd made him wait until next weekend.

The weather looks poor; rain and wind, chilly for May, not conducive to getting little boys outside. Not sure whether I have enough liquor in the house to survive seven six-year-olds inside for two hours high on greed and chocolate.

I think I'll put out the special welcome mat...(h/t to Blue Gal, whose find this is.)

I see that the Timbers won their first game tonight. Good. They looked undertrained and overmatched when my friend Brent and I went to see them Thursday.That the lineup that started tonight got two goals and a win - better. I'm still hoping to see more of Alex Nimo. I'm still hoping to see the backline start marking up on set plays and crosses; this is professional football, boys, you can loll about marking goddam space now. I'm through hoping that Takayuki Suzuki is ever going to step up and become a scorer - this ain't the AFC and you ain't gonna score on Rochester like the traditional powers of Oman and Syria, Taka.

Mostly I'm just happy that the American soccer season is under way. I'm ready to get outside and kick the ball around again.

Speaking of sport...I'm already starting to get excited about the 2009 Giro d'Italia. How about the cast of characters, starting with the newly-repaired cyborg-Armstrong and his bolted-together collarbone. His old rivals Basso and Sastre. I'll miss Cadel Evans, but the rest of usual crew will make things interesting enough. Plus the questions of how effective the dope testing will be, the "New Blue Train" of Astana taking on the western European teams, and the fun of watching the upstarts of Columbia/High Road and Garmin-Chipotle shoulder their way onto the cycling roads of the old continent.

I came across thissomewhere on the web and had two thoughts:

One, why would you want to hold still while someone jabbed someting that long and painful that into your backside, and, two,

What's the point? Why would you want something like this? Is it like those bulletin boards you occasionally see in mens' rooms; something to read while you're...umm...otherwise occupied? WTF?

People are wierd.

One last thing as I wrap up the Peeper's little Star Wars guys...we watched "The Revenge of the Sith" again (for like the third time) tonight. It's a very flawed picture for a lot of reasons (George Lucas can't write dialog, for one), and only because it's a space opera do I avoid my usual tactical nitpicking "Who the hell trained you to move/shoot/dig in like that?!?" and barking at the screen I usually do at the screen when war films come around.

But the third time I finally put my finger on a very specific thing was bugging me in the film.

It comes near the end, where the bad evil former-President-now-Emperor dials up his clone army commanders and says simply: "Execute Order 66". This is the signal for all the soldiers to cut down their "Jedi knight" commanders, shooting them in the back.And I realized what about that bugged me, what had bugged me about that from the first time I saw it; it just doesn't work, even for fiction. It requires you to believe something impossible, and for the characters to act in ways that people just DON'T.

I'm not saying that soldiers have never and would never shoot down their officers, or turn on their leaders. They have at times throughout history. And, of course, certain officers practically invite fragging just by being incompetent, ruthless or just dicks. And the movie postulates that these guys are "clones", and the "Order 66" compulsion is bred into them, like an instinct for retrieving into a Labrador.

But, by and large, fighting with someone, for someone, depending on them for survival...that changes you. And your relationship with them. You may love them or hate them, but you get to know them in ways you might not know a regular friend, a lover or a child. And, while fighting soldiers can get pretty callous about people they don't know, with the guys they've fought with they can be closer than family. These troops and the Jedi officers aren't supposed to be strangers - in fact, crucial to the plot is the relationship between the clone soldiers and their Jedi officers prevents the Jedi, who are otherwise vastly more deadly than their identical troops, from cutting their way out of the ambush.

So there was the problem: here's this huge plot point, one of the most dramatic in a movie full of blood and thunder, that totally depends on having one person shoot and kill another who is, not a stranger or a nameless authority, but someone that they have risked their life with, fought with, braved fear and danger with, seen tired and silly and angry and hopeful, talked with about their home and family, of the peaceful times they hoped to survive through the fictional war they were both fighting.

Even for fiction...nah. It just doesn't work. And clumsy fiction just bugs me. It lacks...elegance. What do you think?

But regardless of what WE think, my kids loves it, and it's HIS birthday.

So I'm off to bed to get some sleep before Birthday Order 6-year-old.G'night.

The Rains Come to Stay

So Mojo gets out her grow-light to keep off the wintertime blues.Little Miss loves Mommy's bright light and wants to sit with her every morning. Mojo reads and does the bookkeeping, Missy draws wonderful ovals and squiggles that she says are "Max", "Mommy", Shea-Shea", "kitties" and "Daddy".She couldn't resist showing off for the camera though.Big brother Peeper spent some time playing nicely with his baby sister today, for which he received many a hearty spanking.After the kids get up and about it's time for Fat Nitty and Miss Lily to take possession of the bed. Here they are engaging in competetive loafing.I think that Nitty's winning.

In case you're wondering - and I'm quite sure you're not - the title of this post is from another post, that is, a short story, from a collection of stories called "Comrade Don Camillo" that was written in the 1950s and 60s, along with a bunch of other Don Camillo stories about a little town on northern Italy and the characters that lived in the imagination of the Italian author and journalist Giovaninno Guareschi.

I was introduced to these stories when I was very young - I think I read the first one sometime in junior high school so, say, about 1970. I had no idea what the Cold War meant to Europe, where the hell the Po Valley was or anything else about the people in the stories. But they were wonderful stories, full of strange humor and characters I'd never even thought of thinking of.

Oh - just to break in here - Missy has figured out that the massaging shower head is even more fun that flinging the water out of the tub by hand. Cunning girl.

Anyway, I think I titled another post sometime away back "Blue Sunday". Why, here it is. Another Don Camillo story; you can see my mind is like a pack-rat's nest. It never throws anything away, just hoards it in some crevice until it wants it again.

So if you have a moment and feel the urge, spend some time with the big priest and the big Red mayor from the little Tuscan town. You might find you're glad you did. I hope so, anyway.

It's late and time for bed. But I'll drop in tomorrow. Saw an odd little movie and it's been on my mind; got some things to say about it.

What I'm reading: The Golden Compass

Usually I try and avoid the hype around the "now-a-major-motion-picture" kinds of fiction. The last time I succumbed was waaaay back in the Eighties when I chased down the original material desecrated by the Sean Penn/Madonna excresence "Shanghai Surprise" and found the cleverly entertaining "Faraday's Flowers" by Tony Kenrick.This year's model appears to be "The Golden Compass", adapted from the first of Phil Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. I honestly don't have much of an interest in seeing the film until it emerges on DVD. While I don't mind seeing movies of books I enjoy - I'm no book-to-movie purist - I just can't see how you fit all the density of TGC the book into a flick and keep it under three hours. There's just too much there. I understand that the movie-insider world is full of talk about an "extended cut" DVD, which makes perfect sense to me.

Funny - after getting a couple of chapters into TGC it dawned on me that I had read this as a younger man, probably some time in the Nineties when it was first released. It was as rich and complex as I remembered, with an enjoyably flawed heroine, Lyra "Silvertongue" Belaqua, whose adopted surname is a self-tribute to her most polished trait - her ability to instantly invent a lie that will fly. All the other elements were as I remembered them...the gyptians, panserbjornen, witches, daemons...and the subject of this post, the Bad Guys, the "Authority" - the "Church" of the Dark Materials world.

So the public face of the film, and to a lesser and earlier extent the book, has been clouded by some sort of odd religious fooforaw from the Catholic League, supposedly because of the anti-clerical and atheistic content of the film, drawn from the text it is based on.

What's fascinating to me about this is what it tells me about how we (Americans, Westerners, Euro-Americans) as a culture tend to be so easily fixated on the simple comic-book versions of things. I have no idea what the movie says about religion or churches, but I understand that the antireligious content is considerably suppressed relative to the book. And in the book, which is one of the most entertaining things about the book, the question of "Who is The Authority, what is it doing and why" is complex and deeply woven into the story. There are no cackling, drooling heirophants or burly inquisitors bursting with dark energy. What does emerge from Lyra's adventures is that there is an entity deeply committed to its agenda, that is, its beliefs, and that to protect and advance those beliefs this organization is prepared to make great...efforts. To the point, as I'm reading now, of committing crimes; physical violations of people the organization sees as dangerous, as threats to its' beliefs and the power those beliefs provide.

And...I would ask; what is so shocking, so heinous, about asserting that? From the Albigensian Crusade to the silence of the Vatican about the Nazi genocide, when hasn't power and temporal gain warred - and often won - over righteousness in the history of the Christian Church? And don't think I'm letting Islam off the hook. Monotheistic religions in particular tend to spend a LOT of time chasing down and smashing heretics, apostates and nonbelievers in general. This "controversy" seems to me to have more to do with the incapacity of our ever-less-literate society to comprehend that there is usally more to any conflict than "good-guys-bad-guys". I'd use the term "fatheaded" if I didn't think it an insult to Dora the Explorer's immense, football-shaped head.

But, regardless of the faith of the reader, the writer in this case has produced something worth reading. Give TGC a try - I think you'll be pleasantly diverted spending some time in the world of the dark materials.

Saturday junk fiction blogging: worlds and wenches

I had an odd week this week: lots of work but large chunks of down time while things like the drillers breaking their mud pump and trying to fix it happened. So I got to do a bit more reading than usual. And I chose to re-read an old favorite: A Planet in Arms, by a fella named Donald Barr.

Barr sems to have been an interesting character: educator, engineer, former OSS agent, and the author of a slew of books on everything you can imagine: kids books, tech manuals and two science fiction volumes, this one and the slightly less-political Space Relations.

The thing is that Barr is just a good writer. He has a knack for creating people you enjoy meeting, as well as how those people talk (providing you could talk as cleverly as you'd like to talk), is erudite without being obnoxious about it, and - this is the most critical part - writes clearly, passionately and vividly. His gift for words lift these little books above the standard genre space-opera fare. They're out of print but you can find them at Amazon for surprisingly cheap prices...

Now Mojo knows my taste in junk fiction as well as anyone, which is why she picked up a copy of "The General's Wench" for me the last time she was at the Goodwill. I bring this up only because it drives home the distinction between well crafted junk fiction and junky junk fiction. The Wench was my other take-along novel. and, well, Barr's work is junk fiction: it has no deeper meaning, will not change your life, but it is written with care and love and will return you an investment in images for your time, a sort of little literary scrimshaw valuable for its own craft.

But The Wench? Well, no matter how many wenchings, whippings, skulduggeries and times Sabrina's bosom (a prominent feature of this thing) gets agitated when she peeks through her window and sees Sir John "take a running jump and land ploof" (seriously, no shit actual quote) alongside Molly, the referenced wench, it's still utter crap. And not even really fun crap. The rotten writing, slow pace, poor plotting and wooden characters make it hell to wade through.

So just as there's a big difference between Jane Austin's elegant prose and the tortured morass of Sir Walter Scott, there's a world of difference between the effort put in and the reward obtained from these two throwaway paperbacks.

Ploof.

Friday Fiction Blogging

For this springtime Friday, one of my personal favorites in the military science-fiction category: Robert Frezza.

Not sure what happened to this guy. He cranked out five novels in seven years but hasn't been heard from since the middle '90s. Three of the five are among what I consider - as insanely voracious consumer of popular fiction, retired soldier as well as science-fiction geek - among the best of the genre.

It's all there: complex, well-thought-out plots; rich characters with tangled motives, hopes and fears; and above all - lush, captivating prose.

As a stylist I defy anyone to equal the - you'd pretty much have to call her - "doyenne" of military SF, Lois M. Bujold. Her Miles Vorkosigan series is perhaps unmatched in depth and fecundity of imagination. David Drake may bring more of the reek of blood and cordite to your bedside table; S.M. Stirling may have a grander scope (although also rings a bell for sheer creepiness - a lot of his stuff has some truly twisted sexual kinks buried inside).
But Frezza can bring it - and he gets right to the heart of what makes it well that war is so terrible, else we should too fond of it. His political setting (a senescent Japanese Empire, whose colonial possessions are run - increasingly poorly - by zaibatsu) is fully realized, his concepts of future warmaking are logical and have a dramatic effect on the course of the novels, and most of all his ability to draw his characters as real people, with real problems, real wishes, real illusions...well, that's a real novelist, in my book. His Anton Vereschagin, Hanna Bruwer and Danny Meagher are as fully realized as any of the fictional people you met in school: Hamlet, Lizzy Bennett, Ramona Quimby...

The plots - not to give away anything - are straightforward: a "corporation" planet, Suid Afrika, is in rebellion against its corporate masters. Lt. Colonel Vereschagin and the 35th Infantry (Rifle) are dispatched to set things upright again. Like any good book, the fun is in the details. Afrikaner politics, imperial overstretch, G.I. cynicism, love, death...it's all there, and written with the effort of someone who clearly loves his characters and wants you to read their story.

I have to be honest and say that the quality falls off a bit with "Cain's Land" - the truth is that the series logically ended with the second novel "Fire In A Faraway Place". But once you've journeyed with the Imps and the Afrikaners, the cowboys and the Sects to Ashcroft, Novy Sibr and Suid Afrika, it's hard not to go along for the last ride.

Give him a try. It can be hard, teaching a pig to whistle. But the tune is worth the effort...