Limerick Friday #630: It's Been A Month And Nothing Is OK -- Day 1,800

 

While our reps cower

The tools have seized power

Brain cells are lacking

And the crimes are stacking

Locked away in the Irony Tower

For years, they've been stuck in a mire

No matter the talent they did acquire

Culture change needed

With Ben Johnson, they heeded

Did the Bears just nail a coach hire?

Ethics never matter to ESPN

Hypocrisy is a matter of when

Kirk Herbstreit crying on air?

Because OSU won the title, I swear

Journalism just died yet again

"Loudermilk" a breath of fresh air

I giggle at almost every swear

But not just raunchy and overdone

It's got a heart as big as the sun

The emotions for which I did not prepare

As winter storms clear

Spring training is here

As the Mets chase a pennant

Getting used to Soto will take a minute

For Iglesias, I do shed a tear

Last time ...

Day 1,799, Quasi-Quarantine: "As Good As Dead" Serves As Darkest Installment And Finale Of Memorable Trilogy

 

“Is it normal for one person to have this many enemies? I’m the problem, aren’t I?

“How did it get so late already?

“I understand why they all hate me.

“I might hate me too.”

The third installment in the "Good Girl's Guide to Murder" series, "As Good As Dead" is decidedly darker and more disturbing. In the follow-up to "Good Girl, Bad Blood," Holly Jackson puts Pip Fitz-Amobi into increasingly intense and no-win situations.

Our protagonist makes impossible decisions, endures self-loathing, and floats through much of the story in a dream state due to insomnia. Along the way, Jackson cleverly weaves in discussion of police misconduct and the broader problem of false confessions.

"As Good As Dead" raises a lot of troubling moral questions and ventures somewhat beyond the edges of traditional YA material, but serves as a fitting coda to an absorbing trilogy -- and a fascinating lead character.

“She cried and she let herself cry, a few minutes to grieve for the girl she could never be again.”

Day 1,798, Quasi-Quarantine: "Just Kids" A Gritty, Melancholy, Celebratory View Of 1970s NYC Art Culture

“It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys.”

Gritty but emotional, "Just Kids" is the improbably tale of love between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe as they struggle with identity and aspiration in New York City. Smith paints a compelling portrait of the journey from homelessness to fame for the duo, inseparable despite a myriad of differences.

“It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”

This book had been on my to-read list for years, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. Smith's combination of courage and naivete is something to behold, and her brushes with era icons like Andy Warhol lent even more depth to the story.

“I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”

The author obscures a number of conversations early in the book related to her family and her escape to New York, but finds her voice in documenting the litany of coincidences that allowed her to find Robert, her path, and her future.

“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to the truth.”

Melancholy, sweet, and heartbreaking, "Just Kids" has gaps like any tale of life, but is essential reading for anyone interested in the culture and climate of 1970s NYC and how cosmic twins can find one another in its shadows and alleys.

“We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.”

Day 1,796, Quasi-Quarantine: "Chain-Gang All-Stars" Is A Thought-Provoking Examination Of The Cyclical Connection Between Incarceration And Entertainment

 

“Sometimes I’m sure I can’t be killed. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’ve already died.”

Nana Kwame Adjlei-Brenyah's all-too-real tale of prisoners fighting for their lives in gladiator-style made-for-TV events is both compelling and heartbreaking. "Chain-Gang All-Stars" is vividly realized, while also weaving in citations about incarceration in the United States.

“It was hard to forget the things that hurt you. You didn’t often forget the shape of your cage.”

The coerced battle to the death for "Blood Points" (value: one one-thousandth of one cent), so the sheer violence can be hard to take at times.

“Some truly didn’t think about the fact that men and women were being murdered every day by the same government their children pledged allegiance to at school.”

The book can also be difficult to follow at first as perspectives change, and the sheer number of characters can make it difficult to follow on occasion. 

“Because he was ruined he ruined and was ruined further.”

While the Thurwar-Staxxx throughline was compelling, "Chain-Gang All-Stars" may have benefited from more time dedicated to the Simon J. Craft storyline, which served to humanize the reality-show elements of the plot.

“ … As always, the massive violence of the state was ‘justice,’ was ‘law and order,’ and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror. It would have been funny if there weren’t so much blood everywhere.”

“The police begged again for peace as they rolled their tanks forward.”

The novel ends in a slightly ambiguous fashion befitting the overall arc of "Chain-Gang All-Stars." The overall read was brutal, but the underlying message is resonant and important.

“I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this.”

Day 1,793, Quasi-Quarantine: "The Guest" Explores Concepts Of Value, Belonging Among The Insufferable 1%

 

“Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.”

This novel explores sexuality, caste systems, the service economy, and privilege in a way that is slightly undercut by an unreliable narrator. The protagonist of "The Guest," Alex, is a blank slate the reader can imprint any number of "struggles" onto, with the lack of an origin story guiding these examinations.

“The thrill was familiar. The giddy anxiety of watching yourself and waiting to see what you would do next.”

From kleptomania to nymphomania to impulse control, Alex resists categorization in what seems to be a highly conscious choice by Emma Kline. However, where the book's intent seems to be to portray Alex as complicated and misunderstood, the overall effect leans hard toward intentionally confusing.

“She’d been almost jealous of the people she’d known in the city who’d totally cracked up, spiraled into some other realm. It was a relief to have the option to fully peace out of reality.”

"The Guest" is undeniably engrossing, leading to a manic read that matches the story's rhythm and pace. While readers may find themselves wanting more interiority from the serial thief/sex worker Alex, Cline withholds it in a way that can foster frustration -- balanced against absorption.

“The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.”

Day 1,791, Quasi-Quarantine: All Themes Welcome In Southern Gothic Noir Entry "All The Sinners Bleed"

“The South doesn’t change … just the names and the dates and the faces. And sometimes even those don’t change, not really. Sometimes it’s the same day and the same faces waiting for you when you close your eyes.

“Waiting for you in the dark.”

S.A. Cosby continues his string of intense Southern noir novels with "All the Sinners Bleed," a worthy successor to "Blacktop Wasteland" and "Razorblade Tears." His latest features a demonic serial killer terrorizing a small community in southeastern Virginia.

“The ability of one human to visit depravity upon another was as boundless as the sea and as varied as there were grains of sand on the beach.”

The book has good pacing that is only slightly challenged by a couple of bizarre scenes that just don't work and some super-long sentences. Oddly, there were also a few too many dragon similes -- four, to be exact.

"All the Sinners Bleed" tackles racism, grief, and religious zealotry -- weighty themes that can feel overwhelming in the same tale, but coalesce fairly well in Cosby's hands. For entertainment relief, the Raleigh-based band American Aquarium gets a notable mention.

“I could also have monkeys fly out of my butt. Don’t mean I’m gonna start buying bananas for toilet paper.”

Cosby's work is intense, but not overly challenging. These days, that's a feature and not a bug, as books that demand too much mentally or emotionally can feel overwhelming.

“ … But that was the thing about violence. It didn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it saw a crack in the dam and then it flooded the whole valley.”

The ending is solid and the story is timely. Cosby knows grittiness, and he nails it again in "All the Sinners Bleed."

“It occurred to him no place was more confused by its past or more terrified of the future than the South.”

Day 1,789, Quasi-Quarantine: Themes Of Love, Identity, Belonging Fuel Unforgettable "The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay"

“Joe, on the floor, was aware for a moment that he was lying on a sour-smelling oval braided rug, in an apartment recently vacated by a girl who had impressed him, in the few instants of their acquaintance, as the most beautiful he had ever seen in his life, in a building whose face he had scaled so that he could begin to produce comic books for a company that sold farting pillows, in Manhattan, New York, where he had come by way of Lithuania, Siberia, and Japan.”

Stunning in its breadth, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" pulled off the truly impressive feat of being a novel of 700 pages that left you wanting more.

“‘There is only one sure means in life,’ Deasey said, ‘of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.’”

Michael Chabon's New York City of the 1940s is full of hope and despair, opportunity and obstacle, love and pain. The author has created vivid backdrops, rich back stories, and engrossing historical context to populate this terrain.

“The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, rising and echoing through the pipes until it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream,wishing their wish, teasing their golem into life.”

Chabon's prose manages to be sentimental, hysterical, beautiful, and moving all at the same time. True-to-life dialogue colors in real depth for Sam Clay and Joe Kavalieri, making them relatable and extraordinary.

“It was marvelous that in this big town he had managed to rediscover, a year later, the girl with the miraculous behind.”

“ … There was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick.”

The author has fun with many offshoots of the main storyline, particularly with a fraught Antarctic adventure. Chabon turns Kavalier & Clay into manifestations of the comics they create -- building a stunning, accessible, and compelling novel along the way.

“He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death.”

Day 1,782, Quasi-Quarantine: "The Barn" Unearths Historic Inevitability And Profound Whitewashing Of Emmett Till's Murder

 

“The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn't that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till's murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom.”

Painstakingly researched, "The Barn" benefits from the unique perspective and lived experience of the author, a native Mississippian who had to leave the state to find a full education. 

“The South is built, he said, on never talking about the things right in front of your face. But the sign speaks. It cannot be ignored and here in this palace of national honor, it cannot be forgotten.”

“A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.”

The pain and love are evident in Wright Thompson's prose, as he details the state's origin story as an inevitable path from greed to a lonely barn in the middle of nowhere.

“All of which is to say that money’s only ethic is to reproduce itself, and it keeps on moving, circling, finding the best margins. Once upon a time it found those best margins in the Mississippi Delta.”

Subtitled "A Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi," the book is propelled by powerful interviews and the weight of 345 citations. The result is an emotional, indelible look at a tragedy that has resonated over the decades.

“Rarely has a more cowardly collection of humans been put in the exact right place at the exact right moment to do maximum damage.”

Thompson takes great care to honor the memory of Emmett Till and the community that has done its best to preserve his memory, and his meticulous eye for detail makes the read both challenging and emotional -- yet instructive and beautiful.

“‘At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history,’ Biden said as he made his own closing arguments, ‘we’re making it clear – crystal, crystal clear’ – the crowd’s applause stopped him for a beat – ‘while darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. They can hide, but they erase nothing.’”