ave atque vale

Being Old Ain’t So Bad
by J Petruzzi

once available at Smashwords



Great autumnal weather in the Yu Kay, limpid blue skies, a sun of burnished bronze, cataracts of trees casting brocade of red and gold over the blue-remembered hills, cool hours of sweet birdsong and solitude and then Hesperus whispering from the South as a milky fire consumes the horizon and the gentle air bruises. . . I don’t know what the hell I’m yakking on about, but I do know whatever it is, it is the precise opposite of the rain-and-pain and gurgling drains predicted by the British Weather Forecasting Collective, or whatever their moniker is. Surely the only way those geezers can look themselves in the mirror each morning is because it’s slightly less depressing than looking out the window and seeing how wrong they are.

I love them though. Theirs is not mere meteorological inexactitude. If they didn’t keep telling us the climate is totally shit, it really would be. The clement afternoons, when they do come, are such a surprise they stick in our mind and lead us to believe we’re not rotting in our wellies after all.

And because of the present glut of sunny days, I’ve been out hedging and lopping, which actually, I prefer to reading and writing. For this reason, there’s been a hiatus in this blogging thing. A hiatus in blogging – according to the book of blogging I got free from the library – is fatal. Um, pity.

Actually, a hiatus is fatal to some ebooks. Truly, and in more than one sense, ebooks are contemporary Will o’ the wisps. The book here in question, BOASB, has been sitting on my reader for months, and now that I’ve got round to it, the thing’s disappeared off the net. Dissipated into random electrons. Catullus would have never have been rediscovered if the Romans had used ebooks.

I really love BOASB. Mr Petruzzi argues his case with a charmingly blithe simplicity.

He starts with some background – his autobiography takes about four pages, just like many autobiographies should. To summarize still further:

Education is a blur. He joins the army (it had some good points), he drifts cheerfully from lowly job to lowly job, meets the missus, marriage is the biggest day in his life, he brings up four kids, faces up to the middle-age crisis with courage and battles through to a secure old age.

Now having cleared that up, our author lists some of the benefits of old age itself. These can be surprising. He notes that people congratulate him on doing anything at all – the underlying assumption being that he’s past doing everything. He hits the ball in a game of golf and people think it’s a triumph. Furthermore, he cheerfully takes the praise, no doubt with a knowing smile.

The style is so striking because such unaffected honesty is rare in writing.

What else is striking here is that his life, that of a 20^th Century Everyman, is rapidly becoming the life of a 21^st Century Lucky Minority. He’s always worked. He’s paid off the mortgage. The kids didn’t fly off the rails. And best of all, and the main item on his list of the delights of his old age, is that he’s spending his last days in the company of his wife.

You can’t read it, but it’s highly recommended.

Unsavory Delicacies
by Russell Brookes

2011

Available here and here.

The author offered me his book for review.

These stories are aimed at aficionados of the sting-in-the-tale. It’s a tough field to plough, having been worked so assiduously in the past by writers and film makers. Well, pretty much all of them have given it a go. Not surprisingly, the audience have got skilled at spotting misdirection. Furthermore, they remember the twists in other tales.

As Mr Brookes is hoping to take the reader off guard, I’m not going to give away his plot lines, but I will say that I saw an awful lot coming before it actually arrived. This is not, sadly, down to my cleverness. It is because there are twists and turns in these stories that I’ve see before in films. The twists first two stories in this collection struck me as particularly familiar.

Mr Brookes is not alone. Quite a few authors – some of them big names – have duplicated events from other stories. Unwittingly, no doubt. That’s the worrying thing. Sure, it's always happened, but I’m certain television and movies have had an ultimately deleterious effect on literature. Perhaps because one has to think in order to read, in contrast to watching television, which can be done mindlessly, allowing the ideas to seep in unnoticed.

In the present instance, I found the Russian mafia in the third story to be as inept and unlikely as any Bond villains I’ve ever seen. Okay, this is light entertainment, but the Russian mafia aren’t SMERSH. They’re all too real and referencing them means a writer has to take account of the fact they're not this easy to outwit or push around.

That said, I didn’t see the twist coming in the third story. Furthermore, the prose is clear and unaffected – right for this sort of fiction. It’s marred only by some instances of carelessness. For example a "bit" of wine instead of a "drop".

An enjoyable read and an impressive publicity campaign.

New Poetry

The latest edition of Shot Glass Journal is now up -- ideal for those who like their verse sharp and to the point. I've been meaning to for some time, but I should also mention Astropoetica, which celebrates the poetry of astronomy. It's big in Romania, don't you know. In the latest edition, I particularly liked Andrei Dorian Gheorghe's I Still Have the Sky, and Libration by Christine Klocek-Lim. As always, the illustrative photos are absolutely beautiful -- literally.

The Jesus Fish and Slaughter Bird
by Clark Casey

Available here and Barnes and Noble, etc.

On reaching the end of this story, I realised with some amazement that it might best be described as a romantic comedy.

Actually getting to the point where the four central characters are allowed to live-happily-ever-after involves a surprising quantity of mayhem and misery, including at least one fatal car crash, the neglect by an alcoholic parent, a shooting, an instance of devastating social embarrassment (on a train), squandered talent, divorce, more squandered talent and bankruptcy.

All this takes place over two decades and the relentless progress of all-devouring time is flagged up with not much more than gelled hair, the murder of John Lennon and the millennium bug. Inevitably, it seems a little perfunctory, but then the author has set himself the task of condensing twenty years into the confines of a novella.

The author doesn’t do so badly. He has a sprightly writing style that’s never laboured. Curiously, it was the characters’ potted back stories – the most compressed parts of the book – that worked best for me.
What didn’t work was the humour. For instance, when the main character’s mother is shot by bank robbers and lies expiring on the floor, she is able to console herself with the knowledge she has invested in high-yield life insurance. No doubt about it, this is black humour. However, even the blackest humour rarely travels well, and I’m situated a considerable distance from Brooklyn.

Considering this is basically a comedy, the failure to raise many laughs might be a devastating criticism. However, the author induced me to care about his characters. True, the two main female characters (see title) remain somewhat archetypal right to the end -- that is to say, they never quite shrug off their monikers. But still, he invests them with enough life to make me pity them and feel at least a spark of relief when they finally find the compromised version of contentment that most human beings have to call happiness.