March 2007
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Just when it appears that our corporately-owned pseudo-local newspaper (the Daily Camera) has hit rock-bottom-nadirhood, it plummets to still another new low. It's a bottomless cistern. We're suffering through a horrid local murder. The Camera is covering the story with rare enthusiasm — trying to elevate it to JonBenet Ramsey celebrity status. (It's the Linda…
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Leonardo Sciascia's laconic and precise "metaphysical mystery" The Day of the Owl (Il Giorno della Civetta, 1961) is set in unwholesome, Mafia-dominated Sicily. Captain Bellodi and Sgt. Major Ferlisi, dedicated and intelligent police officers, investigate a series of horrific crimes. Their trail leads to the local boss, Don Mariano Arena, but further searching opens the…
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Last October, I decided that one of my herbaceous peonies — a Prairie Moon, to be precise — needed to be separated and re-planted. I did the deed, but a few days ago, while cleaning the garden, I found a small, overlooked fragment of a tuber — six inches in length and no more than…
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This guest entry was contributed by Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of The Wonderful World of Anagrams (New York, 2006). "Just last week, the Washington Post published a pair of articles on "who wrote Shakespeare's plays." The one claimed that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; the…
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The most glorious fictions that I've read in many years are late writings by two nineteenth-century masters. The first is Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murad; the second, Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart. Hadji Murad (published posthumously in 1912) is a novella on the subject of war and its follies. A Simple Heart (1877) is a short…
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From the get-go, our internationally-renowned neighborhood scandal, the JonBenet Ramsey murder, had TV movie written all over it. It had upper-class sheen, infant-beauty-pageant perversity, and tantalizing whodunnitness. Our latest local murder lacks all such glamor. The characters are sad, dumb, and pathetic and, to make matters worse, everyone already knows whodidit. Fodder for what sort…
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A year or so ago, I confessed that when I read novels that take place in pre-internal combustion days, I don't clearly distinguish among various horsedrawn conveyances — they're all coaches to me. I have no mental image of "fly," "trap," "landau," "chaise," "phaeton," "cabriolet," "sulky," "surrey," "curricle," "gig," "hansom," "buggy," "four-wheeler," or "spring-van." The…
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My first writing instrument was the "straight pen," which was more durable but not different in conception from the goose quill — simply a metal nib set into a wooden dowel. It was quite a trick for a six-year-old to carry a small drop of ink from the inkwell and draw a line or circle…
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During my Erasmus Hall High School years, the hottest of all "hot" books was Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes. It was official doctrine that a single oblique glance at the inflammatory cover of this paperback could transform a well-behaved kid into a murderous, reefer-crazed, oversexed hooligan. Simply to read about the "juvenile delinquents" who populate…