We move through life so quickly. Children cram play-dates and lessons between study for entrance exams. Letters gave way to phone calls, then email and disappeared with video-chats and tweets. We create five-year, ten-year and twenty-year goals, power-walking our way through life and all we see is what’s before us. But is that all there is? Aislinn Hunter suggests in The World Before Us that what we sense in this accelerated life is the narrowest universe of all. Jane Standen is the fulcrum of this story, a quiet woman with a disquieting past. Years ago, she took a little girl into the forest and the child disappeared in the woods. Nothing has brought Jane to terms with this loss and now she’s in a career that uncovers lost detail. As an archivist, Jane works in a Victorian museum, cataloging the data and detail of an earlier age. The museum’s closure and an encounter with the child’s father occupy her conscious mind. It does not fill the conscious of the spirits that follow Jane, ghosts vitalized by her search of the past. These spirits narrate The World Before Us as they watch the present and Jane. Disembodied but kind, they study…
The flowering dogwood is blooming. Spring is taking time showing the rest of her sweet face but the dogwood branches are in blossom and their branches look like suspended wedding lace at twilight. This condition will last about a week until the apple-green leaves take their place and the petals will drift to the gutters. The temp is still nowhere near 80 but it’s warm enough in the sun. It’s time to read Fitzgerald again. If a writer can be tied to the weather, F. Scott Fitzgerald is Summer and Spring. There’s an exuberance and energy in his early stories match the hope and joy of Spring and the redolence of summer is the setting for Gatsby. Clothes are loose in Fitzgerald stories, smiles are warmer and many characters are on holiday. Even sad stories, like Babylon Revisited contain memories of warm weather but since we’re talking about a Southern Spring, the the Fitzgerald du jour is “The Ice-Palace.” Fitzgerald first saw the South in 1918, while he was serving in the Army. First Kentucky, then Georgia and finally Alabama in summer where he met his wife, Zelda Sayre. By the time Ice Palace is published, Scott Fitzgerald has noted…
When I hear someone say, “I Love the sound of an Irish Band” I make a few assumptions. If the person is significantly older than me and/or playing an acoustic instrument I figure they mean one of the Irish Folk groups like The Chieftains, the Clancy Brothers or the Irish Rovers. If the person is around my age and/or playing an electric guitar, I guess they’re probably talking about U2 and Thin Lizzy. If the person talking shows no sense of humor, they’re probably talking about Sinead O’Connor. Me, I’ve got an ear for it all (almost all!) but my favorite Irish Band today exists only in fiction. If you want a fast read that keeps you grinning for days (or a film with a killer sound), let me introduce you to The Commitments. The time is the late 1980’s and Jimmy Rabbitte has a reputation around Dublin as a man who knows his music. He buys every record that comes out, reads every trade paper and never misses a pop music show, even the ones he despises. So when his buddies, Outspan Foster and Derek Scully think their three day old band needs a new direction, it’s Jimmy’s advice…
They say there’s one day a year when everyone’s Irish and that’s St. Patrick’s Day. Well, that’s what I’ve heard in America, where everyone insists they’re part Irish and celebrates March 17th like it was their personal 4th of July. On such matters, I defer to the late Frank McCourt who said “A well-placed bomb at the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade would wipe out the cream of Irish mediocrity”. (Thank heavens he said it before 2001; today, a remark like that would land a quipster on the no-fly list). Me, I wish my family was Irish but my mother’s people mainly came from England and Italy and my dad’s Celtic ancestors sailed to America after they were “unfriended” in Scotland and Ireland. In other words, they were Ulster Scots. But, like lots of people I know, I’m a big fan of the Auld Sod and I can give you a reason why. No one I know can break your heart the way Irish writers and Irish stories do. And given the time of year this is with the the tide of Easter rising, the Irish tale I go back to is Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916. Seldom…
Ordinarily, we don’t honor disobedient people. Our history does, as many rebels are the heralds of overdue change, but in this world where most folks “go along to get along” the contrary soul is a resented member of a community. Every town has these intractable dissenters who, even when they are right, still alienate their peers with their hard-headed ways. Born outsiders, these nonconformists follow their own lonely stars though life, with few friends for love or guidance, not because they want to be difficult but because time and circumstance force them into this uneasy role. That is the theme of T. K. Thorne in her second historical novel, Angels at the Gate, and it stars one of the Bible’s most baffling women: Lot’s wife, the woman who disobeyed a command from God’s angels and looked back, at cost of her life. I never understood the behavior of Lot’s wife when I read her story in Sunday School. To me, when the town is literally falling to pieces around your ears and two white-garbed, winged men suddenly appear, shouting “Run for the hills and don’t you dare look back!” it’s time to follow orders and get the heck out of…