jots on books

"Tales of the Uncanny" -- Various

2006-11-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

Not into Readers' Digest generally, but the Holmes Murder Castle, Rasputin and Daniel Home are all covered and very entertainingly, not the usual thing at all. This is a very cool collection of a few "fictionalized" strange things.

"Mythago Wood" -- Robert Holdstock

2006-11-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

Shows how much the archetypes of old Brittain etc. mesh with the archetypes of Princess Mononoke, a fantasy, very British, but very engaging, once you push into it. Spose I might read the follow up.

"Stories of Terror and Madness From the Borderlands"

2006-10-06T22:11:00.000-07:00

E. and T. Monteleone eds

"...With a new Novella by Stephen King." ...like every other anthology out there doesn't have that blurb...

Regardless, this is a nice, unthemed 25-story collection.

- "Rami Temporalis" by Gary A. Braunbeck, about a man with a very special face.

- "All Hands" by John Platt. A strange story that reads like a fable, though I'm sure I don't understand the moral.

- "The Food Processor" by Michael Canfield. Another fable that sticks with you, though I wish Aesop were around to wrap these sorts of stories up for me. I think this has something to do with gluttony.

- "Answering The Call" by Brian Freeman. What goes on elsewhere when you're at someone's funeral may surprise you.

- "Smooth Operator" by Dominick Cancilla. A truly devoted stalker, always the stuff of horror.

- "A Thing" by Barbara Malenky. Another fable-like tale, probably my least favorite in the book.

- "The Planting" by Bentley Little. This story is all over the place, it's creepy, but I think I missed the point along the way... Probably my bad.

- "Magic Numbers" by Gene O'Neill. Another story more about mental insanity or psychosis than horror and magic...or is it?

- "Head Music" by Lon Prater. Science Fiction meets horror on a lonely beach.

- "One Of Those Weeks" by Bev Klein. Ever lose something? Like, everything?

- "Stationary Bike" by Stephen King. Interesting idea. But if it wasn't King, I don't think it would have made the cut.

There's more, and many stick with you. Not much cheerful here. King's is one of the more upbeat...

"Almost Golden -- Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News"

2006-10-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

by Gwenda Blair

The interesting part of this book is the part about the selling of network TV news. It's a history of how the news got dumbed-down.

But you can't blame Savitch for that...she was trained and groomed just as an announcer, and at that she apparently excelled. Her problems came with people who expected more of her than a TelePromTer reader or talking-head.

Apparently Savitch had a savage addiction, maybe cocaine, maybe percocet. She had an infinite desire to be popular and perform. She just never got enough of public adoration.

She had a crappy life, actually.

Funny things from the book, that Savitch had blonded and blanded her Jewish self so much that in her teens, while out with a gentile boy, a Jewish woman leaned over and remarked to Savitch's mother that "you have a nice Jewish boy there, but oy! The shicksa he's with--!"

Not funny parts, her husband hanging himself at their home with her dog's leash, knowing she'd be the one to find him. That's wacked. And that after a miscarriage, plus her husband's suicide, plus a divorce, plus an abortion, people wondered why she was having a breakdown.

"Take a Walk on the Dark Side"

2006-10-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

Gary Patterson

Essentially the same book as Hellhounds on Their Trail, some is pretty interesting, but the long additions of numbers for numerological significance gets a little old.

Also, if a band is around 10 years and only one member dies, is it really a curse?

Worth reading esp for historical interest.

"Cruel Sacrifice"

2006-09-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

Aphrodite Jones

The dust jacket blurb captures the "sideshow" style of so much true crime writing:

New York Times bestselling book!
Ordinary teenagers...
extraordinary killers!

On a freezing January in 1992, five teenager girls crowded into a car. By the end of the night, only four of them were alive. The fifth had been tortured and mutilated nearly beyond recognition. Her name was Shanda Sharer; her age--twelve.

When the people of Madison, Indiana, heard that a brutal murder had been committed in their midst, they were stunned. Then the story became even more bizarre. The four accused murderers were all girls under the age of eighteen: Melinda Loveless, Laurie Tackett, Hope Rippey, Toni Lawrence.

Here, for the first time, veteran true crime journalist Aphrodite Jones reveals the shocking truth behind the most savage crime in Indiana history--a tragic story of twisted love and insane jealousy, lesbianism, brutal child abuse, and sadistic ritual killing in small-town America...and of the young innocent who paid the ultimate price.

"Little Lost Angel -- The True Story Of The Teenage Conspiracy To Kill Twelve Year Old Shanda Sharer"

2006-09-15T21:48:00.000-07:00

Michael Quinlan

True Crime - about the atrocious murder of Shanda Sharer by four teenage girls in Indiana.

The title gives away the books' spin: that Sharer was a total angel.

This is a better book than it's competetor, "Cruel Sacrifice, but given that Quinlan was a darling of the Sharers and the other author (Aphrodite Jones) was a darling of Melinda Loveless' family (the girl who "started" the plot), the slant is different in each book. Which is why I read them both, back to back.

Details of the crime and other info available on her find-a-grave memorial site.

On April 21, 2001, 45-year-old Courier-Journal reporter Michael Joseph Quinlan died from brain cancer.

"Man Corn -- Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest"

2006-09-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

Christy G. Turner II, Jacqueline A. Turner

Caution - this book goes into great detail about death and the consquences of violence. It is not for the faint-hearted. Use caution in reading! Man Corn: from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word tlacatlaolli which translates to "a sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn."

COOL! A science book with a parental warning sticker!

This book rocked a lot of boats when it came out, and the waves are still inducing seasickness in the usually unperterbable community of sociologists, ethnographers and scholars. Sound dull? Nah!

Think Cannibal Holocaust meets Indiana Jones meets CSI.

The myth of the tree-hugging ancient family-of-man, sitting around communal fires sharing roots and vegetables while singing Kumbayah comes under scientific scrutiny here.

I came away with more respect for the extraordinary attention to detail this kind of work requires and the immense amounts of time in the field and just sorting and categorizing that archeology seems to require. So the book has plenty of tables, data and photographs to back up it's claims.

That humans have never lived in "harmony" and "ecological balance" and have always, if only periodically, engaged in warfare, genocide, slaughter, and even cannibalism is the proposition put forward in this book. I'm not sure why this is even questionable, except for, as the authors point out, the desire of modern man (and historic writers, too) to believe in an eden-like perfection that once existed, and could therefore be re-achieved.

Any scholarly, high-brow archeology book that comes with a warning is going to score high with me just for audacity! I found myself reading the descriptions of various bone damage with great interest, trying to reassemble the events that would lead to such wounds, with sympathy for the people represented by crushed or scalped and skinned skulls, broken femurs, and teeth. Some of these victims were tortured or scalped while alive, and the bones are the witnesses.

The idea that seemed most fascinating to me is barely touched upon, though. That the Anasazi, Hopi and Pueblos of the Southwest were influenced, and perhaps preyed upon, by refugees or agents of Aztec/Toltec culture. The horned-serpent of the Hopi and various family names that arrived after the collapse of those empires, and the apparent skinning and sacrifice and eating of people, are just a few of the tantalizing pieces of evidence touched upon.

Chaco Canyon is built for defense, apparently, with communal homes, towers for watching and thik defensive walls. However, as the authors point out, things may not be as simple as peaceful farmers holding up in high, defensable places. The archetecture and towers resemble strongly the arrangements of meso-american structures, and sacrificial remains, like those in meso-america, are present also, along with macaws, shells and other artifacts mirrored further south.

In other words, Chaco may have been the outpost of invading Toltecs or Aztecs rather than the creation of the locals. Or the creation of locals remaking their society in the mold of their brutal southern neighbors.

Some of this is very dry reading because of the precise, seemingly endless list of bones and damage. But it made me realize how much more mystery there is in investigating the lost stories of the past.

In the knee-jerk reaction you knew would be there, the authors were greatly chided for not having sensitivity to what publishing these results would be. Someone even tried to sue under hate-crime legislation claiming it's "the vision and speculation of skinhead-racist archeologists who "excite themselves with their imaginary stories."

However, the discovery of fossilized human poop full of human flesh in a filled-in kiva, surrounded by butchered human bones, does go a bit toward validating the cannibalism theory. And the drawings and stories of natives, of both North and South America, describe these things. Pots of boiling human body parts, for example, were not painted on the Aztec temples by Christian "revisionists" trying to smear the legacy of the genial and peace loving locals.

Neither is the traditional Hopi account, for another example, of how an entire Hopi village was massacred and savaged -- by fellow Hopis -- is not the invention of any European with a bone to pick (pun!). People are people, everywhere you go, and none are by nature any better than any other.

As the writers say in thier introduction, the desire to believe in an unspoiled place and people without strife who live in harmony with nature runs very strong. This is from http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=5036 and sums it up for me, too

Still, I can’t quite accept this changed picture of the master builders of Casa Rinconada and the paleo-astronomers of Fajada Butte. For years I’d insisted on calling them "Hisatsinom," the Hopi word for "ancient ones," and disdained the common term "Anasazi," a Navajo or Diné word for "ancient enemies."
But now I’m not so sure "ancient enemies’ isn’t the best term, after all, to describe these mysterious ancestors. Maybe the Diné had good reason for their aversion to Anasazi sites, their deep-rooted fear of what, it turns out, may have been a culture gone quite awry.
No longer can I put Chaco Canyon on some kind of ancient Parthenon-like pedestal and see in it an ideal society lost, a primitive utopian vision that we need to work back towards as we step into the future. Instead, I am left with the haunting realization that good and evil, human achievement and human tragedy, cultural marvels and cultural misdeeds are inseparable parts of the circle of life as we know it. And as the Anasazi knew it.
Even today, to walk the beauty way, as the Puebloan peoples and the Diné still believe, is not to stand in the light or revel in the dark, but to walk the path between light and dark, the one balancing the other.
And it’s sobering to realize that, at certain times in the history of all peoples, that balance can be lost and a society - even one revered like the Anasazi - can be plunged into the terror of a Hitler, a Pol Pot.

This is a very expensive book, only available in hardback. But I got several weeks of good reading from it and learned a great deal.

"Special Cases -- Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters"

2006-09-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

[Rosamond Purcell works as a photographer in the back rooms of old museums. She is the author of Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters and three collaborative works with the late Stephen Jay Gould, including Finders Keepers: Treasures and Oddities from Peter the Great to Luis Agassiz. Her photographs of dice, old books, etc can be found in her publications and internationally in various galleries.]

I like Rosamond Purcell because she's a lot like me. She likes to photograph and investigate strange, obscure and dusty things, and meditate on what they might mean. This makes "Special Cases" an interesting coffee table book.

However, due to an utter lack of editing or typographic common sense, it is a very difficult book to actually read.

Purcell photographs these objects adequately, sometimes artfully, and her ruminations do what I like other peoples' thoughts to do -- ie. send my own thoughts down a hundred different paths, too. However, in the text, Purcell seems to shoot her wad in the introduction, and aside from descriptions of the illustrations, repeats herself quite often without elaborating, as if she's exhausted the possiblities of the subjects or herself in the effort of the telling.

So it is her photgraphs that are the meat of the book, and they do inspire fascination.

The captions, such as "hydrocephalic child whose skull has opened like a flower," are sometimes as poetic as the images and don't come across as the pretentious BS one often finds in photographers describing their subjects.

Sometimes she seems to tease with a photo and a bit of information, not filling in the story. I found her photograph of straight pins removed from the body of an insane morphine addict to be absolutely fascinating. After all, someone had to remove all these, and arrange them as you see them, meticulously. Who is more obsessive then, the addict who embedded these objects in herself, or the curator who spent such time and care in retrieving and presenting them?

Purcell appears to use a large format Polaroid camera for most of her photographs, another thing I admire. The lush results speak for themselves -- I don't think that digital has quite killed film just yet.

I would not pay full price for this book, because it is pricey for such unreadable, maddening text, but for the photos and to try to read in small bites for the free-range of ideas from a wide-ranging mind, I would recommend it.

I like the photography enough that I will look for her work in the future.

jots and jolts

2006-09-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

jots and jolts

Parent Blog, of Many things.

What you will find here

2006-09-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

My thoughts on books I am reading or have read, and ideas of interest derived from them, mainly for myself.

Additions and comments are welcome!