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a video that will shock you!

By Vick Mickunas | Friday, August 29, 2008, 09:51 AM

Libraries are the repositories of the acquired knowledge of human civilization. In my view a library is a sacred place.

Someone sent me a video today that seems to make the case that there might be some who are charged with protecting these sacred repositories of knowledge who are not up to the task. You can draw your own conclusions.

This is a very short video that was apparently taped yesterday. Warning; if books are sacred to you then this film might be profoundly disturbing for you to view:

To watch it click here.

Here is some additional information that just came in from Judith:

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an Easy Rawlins feast

By Vick Mickunas | Thursday, August 28, 2008, 07:34 PM

The previous post about my favorite crime fiction writers got me to thinking - I realized that I neglected to mention some of my other faves in the genre.

Walter Mosley for instance. I’m a huge fan of his Easy Rawlins series. How could I forget him? Fortunately, Grand Central Publishing just re-issued four Easy Rawlins novels in paperback.

Wow! What a treat! The titles are:

CINNAMON KISS

and BLONDE FAITH

Mosley’s depictions of 1960’s Los Angeles as viewed through the eyes of Easy Rawlins, his soulful private eye are simply fabulous. The plotting is intricate and the bad guys are sinister. Somehow Easy always finds a way to solve the case even if that means twisting the laws around a little bit.

I had the opportunity to interview Walter Mosley one time on the radio. He is an incredibly articulate and astute man. He also never took off his hat. The only other guys that I can recall who never removed their chapeaux were cowboy types; Kinky Friedman and Baxter Black. Naturally Kinky gnawed on an unlit stogie for the entire hour.

Hats off to Walter Mosley!

Vick Mickunas

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SLIP OF THE KNIFE

By Vick Mickunas | Wednesday, August 27, 2008, 05:47 PM

Crime fiction was a late life discovery for me. I never read the stuff. Then, about 15 years ago I started to interview authors on the radio and I came to the realization that I had been missing out on a whole genre of amazing books.

Hundreds of novels later I have my favorites; Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, and Denise Mina. Rankin and Mina are Scots. Rankin’s final Inspector Rebus novel will be published in America next month. It’s good!

Mina put out SLIP OF THE KNIFE (Little,Brown) in February. I finally found the time to read it. It is tremendous!

Mina’s fans have fallen in love with her protagonist, the journalist Paddy Meehan. We have watched Paddy grow in her profession. When we first encountered Paddy she was a young “copy boy” at a newspaper in Glasgow. Paddy may be overweight but when it comes to finding the story she is a heavyweight.

Over the course of these books she has advanced in her field. In this latest episode she has ascended to the rank of columnist and she is the mother of a five year-old boy. Her maternal instincts become a big part of the plot here. Paddy will do anything to protect her wean (the wee lad).

As the story begins we have the classic crime fiction opening; a soon-to-be corpse. The victim is a journalist and Paddy’s former lover. It looks like an IRA assassination but hey, this is Scotland!? What gives?

Mina gets more brilliant with each book. This is one of my faves so far this year.

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Bill and Hill are sharpening their blades

By Vick Mickunas | Tuesday, August 26, 2008, 05:25 PM

Are you ready for the big performance? Hillary Clinton will address the Democratic National Convention tonight in Denver. Tomorrow, Bill Clinton will get his shot at the big stage.

Get ready for a deadly amusing pair of speeches. This will be quite the act. The Clintons must pretend that they wish Barack Obama well. Don’t believe it for a moment. Hillary is more likely to appear sincere. Bill will play the ruddy buddy. Don’t look now, are those knives concealed behind their backs?

They want Obama to lose. If he fails to defeat John McCain then you can expect the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to slip into high gear the very day after the election.

It’s Obama’s election to lose. All those disgruntled Hillaryites who plan to vote for McCain will be pressing their sour grapes into some very bitter whine. I mean wine.

The Democrats should not have to worry about losing this election, right? Do you remember Jimmy Carter? He couldn’t get re-elected in 1980. But four years before he rode the wave of Nixonian disgust right into the White House. Watergate was a second rate burglary that cost the Republicans big time. The Nixon landslide victory of 1972 was swept away by that tsunami of White House corruption and lies.

George W. Bush is deeply unpopular. We are stuck in another quagmire overseas. The economy is circling the drain. Two terms under George W. Bush has meant billions of dollars in deficits with no end in sight.

So, how can the Democrats possibly squander their chance to take back the White House? Just ask Hillary. That gleam in her eyes is the reflection of those sharpened blades and the intent to exact a pitiless revenge upon Barack Obama.

These are strange days. Watch the Clintons as they speak. Those gleams in their eyes are not the lustre of good will or forgiveness.

A bright shining malice glows with avarice and deceit. Beware Barack Obama, your assailants are closer than you realize…

Vick Mickunas

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blogging George Orwell

By Vick Mickunas | Monday, August 25, 2008, 07:14 PM

If George Orwell was alive today he would probably be a blogger according to an article in the New York Times:

August 25, 2008

MEDIA TALK

What George Orwell Wrote, 70 Years Later to the Day

By NOAM COHEN

“Aug. 12 began as a hot morning in Aylesford, Kent, England, only to be followed by a powerful thunderstorm in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the blackberries were beginning to redden.

Aug. 12, 1938, that is.

The observations were made by George Orwell, whose copious diaries are now being published every day in blog form, exactly 70 years after they were made. The scholars behind the project say they are trying to get more attention for Orwell online and to make him more relevant to a younger generation he would have wanted to speak to.

“I think he would have been a blogger,” said Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London who administers the Orwell writing prize and thought up the idea of the blog.

Though as prolific as any blogger (his collected writings occupy some 20 volumes), Orwell, who died in 1950, never had the chance to spontaneously publish his thoughts to a waiting public. Now — with some lag time — they are being made available that way at orwelldiaries.wordpress.com.

The Webmaster has included hyperlinks, including a definition of blackberries (no, not the kind you operate with your thumbs) and a Google map of the sanitorium in Kent in southeast England where Orwell was recuperating from tuberculosis and observing the weather so closely.

The entry from Aug. 10, for instance, is offers this report: “Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.”

Rest assured, he will soon become consumed by the clouds gathering over Europe. Next month the blog will reprint the entries from the political diary he started Sept. 7, 1938.

“The diary isn’t Orwell at his most polemic; it is Orwell at his most steady, most observant,” Professor Seaton said.

Like any good political blogger, Orwell devoured the news, making clippings and looking for shifts in public and government opinion, Professor Seaton said. “He’s partly obsessed by the newspapers because of the start of the world war,” she said. “The diary is written against this almost traumatized understanding that there is going to have to be a second world war.”

The material being reprinted (with the permission of the Orwell estate) can be found in the Orwell archive at University College in London and in the author’s collected works, but “ordinary people won’t go to it,” she said. “I thought, if you publish what he wrote as he wrote it in real time, people would find that rather engaging.”

Professor Seaton said the site would publish at least until 2010, and had more than 50,000 page views since it started on Aug. 9.

The Orwell blog is not the only effort to inject spontaneity into material written generations ago.

For more than a year, Bill Lamin, 60, a retired mathematics teacher in England, has been publishing the letters of his grandfather, who fought in World War I — 90 years to the day.

Part of the attraction for readers, Mr. Lamin said in an e-mail message, was that “no one knows the outcome, whether he lives or dies from letter to letter.”

While the Orwell blog will not have that level of suspense, Professor Seaton said the material was full of tension.

“You do know how this story is going to end,” she said, “but one of the brilliant things is that Orwell doesn’t know how it is going to end.”

NOAM COHEN

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the joys of wanderlust

By Vick Mickunas | Sunday, August 24, 2008, 02:12 PM

In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on an epic journey by train across Asia. In 1975, he published his classic account of that trip, “The Great Railway Bazaar.” This incredible travel story put Theroux on the literary map.

Thirty-three years and some 40 books later, he has re-traced that original journey. He shadowed most of his original route across Europe and into Asia. He recounts the experience in “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.”

He was able to re-create most of his original itinerary. Theroux prefers rail travel. It allows him to savor the sights. Readers encounter the multitude of people that he meets. We eavesdrop on their conversations as he finds out who they are and what they think.

He is a sympathetic listener and a keen observer. These strangers sense that he is an open person. They talk to him about their lives. He asks them what they think about America. Their responses are thought-provoking.

A Turkish scholar observes that “American experts are the problem … they were wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Iraq.” Theroux quizzed this professor about possible motives for dispensing poor advice? His response: “Scholars need to validate the status quo, or they lose their funding.”

After Turkey, the author’s next stop was Georgia, the U.S. ally and a former Soviet republic that was invaded last week by Russia. He observes that “with a vocal Muslim country on every border, Georgia was a natural ally of Bush’s so-called war on terror, though I did not meet any Georgian who agreed with American policy.”

Theroux continued east through central Asia on his “Ghost Train.” He gained entry to oil-rich, isolated Turkmenistan which he describes as “desert wasteland, scrubby bushes, and dusty boulders, an emptiness of lizards, and a landscape like cat litter.”

From Uzbekistan he is forced to fly over the troubled tribal areas where Osama Bin Laden is reputed to be hiding. He lands in India and resumes his train trip.

Arriving in Sri Lanka, he arranges a visit with the legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who passed away earlier this year. Clarke was quite ill, but they still managed to have a fascinating conversation.

After a quick flight across the Bay of Bengal, Theroux lands in Myanmar, formerly Burma, and revisits places he enjoyed on his first trip there.

He heads onward to bustling Thailand, primitive Laos, repressive Singapore, depressing Cambodia and vigorous Vietnam.

China merits barely half a page from Theroux: “Who wants to hear people boasting about their greed and promiscuity?”

The author is older and wiser, yet full of mischief. He is delighted to watch a passenger on his train car reading one of his books. He views her reading with the sense of vicarious delight that we experience as this exotic journey unfolds through his eyes.

Vick Mickunas

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He read the entire Oxford English Dictionary

By Vick Mickunas | Saturday, August 23, 2008, 04:16 PM

His name is Ammon Shea. He read the entire OED. Then, he wrote a book about the experience. The book is READING THE OED - One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Quite a feat!

I interviewed Shea recently. Our conversation will air tomorrow (Sunday, August 24) at 10:30am on WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs at 91.3fm.

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