I think things are headed towards Spring. That sounds crazy after last week’s snow storm, but Saturday the sun was pouring down like paint over the Sherwin Williams globe and there was a warmth in the light I hadn’t felt since September. The sunlight is life here in the Deep South and it’s a birthright we’ve come to expect like warm food and good stories. There’s a lot about this land that’s cringe-inducing but not our warmth and not our stories. Like the land, they are strong and good and so linked to this place that many could not have appeared anywhere else on earth. It takes a Southerner to sculpt some of these tales. The light and heat are characters inside Carson McCuller’s Ballad of the Sad Cafe. The setting is a Georgia summer and if you read it, you’ll fall under the story’s spell and start pulling at the side of your collar to let in a little cool air. There was none in Georgia, not during those summers before air-conditioning when people woke up sweating and laid themselves down to sleep on damp, wrinkled sheets at night, half way to dehydration. The heat is an omnipresent character,…
Sometimes I miss California. Some of my family moved there when I was young and once we’d traveled west to see them, California became more than another state on the map; it became a state of mind. It was a place with gentler weather and attitudes that believed in potential as much as my home state believed in realism, or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. Granted, this was between the late 60’s and early 80’s when California was “the place to be” and I was getting trips to Disneyland but I still miss that pervasive feeling of “yes” that was the California I knew. The residents (very few of the people I met there were natives) might have seemed a little self-indulgent at times but most of them turned out to be very kind and I really loved being there. All those feelings rush back whenever I pick up Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Maupin was another Golden State émigré when he started writing a syndicated column about San Francisco and the other immigrants who found themselves in its embrace during the 1970’s. He wanted to report on the phenomenon of grocery-store cruising (think of…
Sometimes I miss California. Some of my family moved there when I was young and once we’d traveled west to see them, California became more than another state on the map; it became a state of mind. It was a place with gentler weather and attitudes that believed in potential as much as my home state believed in realism, or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. Granted, this was between the late 60’s and early 80’s when California was “the place to be” and I was getting trips to Disneyland but I still miss that pervasive feeling of “yes” that was the California I knew. The residents (very few of the people I met there were natives) might have seemed a little self-indulgent at times but most of them turned out to be very kind and I really loved being there. All those feelings rush back whenever I pick up Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Maupin was another Golden State émigré when he started writing a syndicated column about San Francisco and the other immigrants who found themselves in its embrace during the 1970’s. He wanted to report on the phenomenon of grocery-store cruising (think of…
There are lots of books about young women. And there are lots of books about gorgeous women. There are books about tall women, women who don’t realize how lovely they are and too damn many books about women who stay thin or physically fit without effort. Now a lot of these gals aren’t bad characters; heck, some of them are my long-time favorites but it does get tiresome to run into the same type of heroine, day after day. Thank God for Sue Ann Jaffarian and her creation, Odelia Grey. They’re the girls that break the cliches. Odelia may be fictional but she’s a girl after my own heart. She’s not thin, she’s not young and (like me) she works for lawyers. Not the usual girl on the book cover. At the start of her first adventure, Too Big to Miss, Odelia’s life is a bit in the dumps. Her good boss is retiring, the last date needed firing and skinny shop girls want to treat her like dreck. Odelia knows how to stand up for herself and she gives as good as she gets but it’s sad living that much of life on the defensive and the death of…
One of the amazing powers of literature is its ability to draw aside the curtain. Writers who have experienced other roles in life use their background for a book and the readers get a glimpse of life-in-the-trenches written by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Want to see World War I as a medic? Pick up Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. How much of Mad Men is true? Try Jerry Della Femina’s From those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, a terrific book on advertising. Those books and others entertain us with insights into the human condition but they also enlighten readers by revealing a world we’ve never known. One of my best friends recommended a book that fits in this shelf. No matter what else happens I guarantee you won’t forget You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger. Who could give us a better inside view at military intelligence than a former OSS officer? Roger Hall was an army lieutenant during World War II, ensconced on a base in Louisiana when luck and poor work on the commander’s baseball team led to a transfer to the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA. Because of…