‘The Invisible Hour’ by Alice Hoffman

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn reviews, writing

Quite likely, most readers know Alice Hoffman through her “Practical Magic” series as well as The Dove Keepers. There’s such a variety in her work, that one might wonder if there are multiple Alice Hoffmans out there crafting her thirty novels. If so, her latest book The Invisible Hour, released on August 15th, which may or may not come from yet “another” Hoffman is a tempting treat.

From the Publisher

“From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and the Practical Magic series comes an enchanting novel about love, heartbreak, self-discovery, and the enduring magic of books.

“One brilliant June day when Mia Jacob can no longer see a way to survive, the power of words saves her. The Scarlet Letter was written almost two hundred years earlier, but it seems to tell the story of Mia’s mother, Ivy, and their life inside the Community—an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. But how could this be? How could Nathaniel Hawthorne have so perfectly captured the pain and loss that Mia carries inside her?

“Through a journey of heartbreak, love, and time, Mia must abandon the rules she was raised with at the Community. As she does, she realizes that reading can transport you to other worlds or bring them to you, and that readers and writers affect one another in mysterious ways. She learns that time is more fluid than she can imagine, and that love is stronger than any chains that bind you.

“As a girl Mia fell in love with a book. Now as a young woman she falls in love with a brilliant writer as she makes her way back in time. But what if Nathaniel Hawthorne never wrote The Scarlet Letter? And what if Mia Jacob never found it on the day she planned to die?

“Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”

“This is the story of one woman’s dream. For a little while it came true.”

Reviews

Kirkus says that it’s “Not one of Hoffman’s best, but it may spark a desire to reread Hawthorne.” The Washington Post writes, “Alice Hoffman’s ‘The Invisible Hour’ is the latest fervent tribute to the power of literature and libraries.” The New York Journal of Books says, “With a truly imaginative structure, Alice Hoffman delves into what has become her trademark theme of magic. The Invisible Hour asks a grand ‘What if?’ Not so much the question posed on the book’s jacket: What if Mia Jacob never found the library or The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne? The larger question the novel contemplates is whether a young woman can escape so deeply into a book, and fall so deeply in love with its author that she time travels to 1837 to be with him? “

Even though the reviews are a bit mixed, Hoffman fans care what they think, not what the critics think. Having read most of her work, that’s my approach to The Invisible Hour.

–Malcolm

 

‘Necessary Trouble’ by Drew Gilpin Faust

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books

Faust and I grew up in the South about the same time when Jim Crow was king and most people saw the Civil War as a glorious and noble lost cause.  I’m interested in her take on the world we knew and the trouble people are having talking about that world openly and fairly today.

In an August 22 interview with NPR, she says, “I believe that affirmative action has changed the shape of and the landscape of higher education in a way that we need to continue,” she says. “The past is with us. We can’t pretend that it’s not, even as we misrepresent it or try to erase it.” When asked about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ black history teaching standards, she says, “It’s preposterous and it’s extremely distressing. It’s a complete distortion of the past, which is undertaken in service of the present, of minimizing racial issues in the present by saying everything’s been ‘just great’ for four centuries. Slavery was not ‘just great.’ It was oppressive. It was cruel. It involved exploitation of every sort, physical violence, sexual exploitation. ”

This interview gives you an idea about what to expect in Faust’s new book Necessary Trouble released by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux on August 22.

From the Publisher

“A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.

“To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions―not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives.

“A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted” and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own―one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.

“Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.”

About the Author

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. She was Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, and after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, she served as Harvard’s president from 2007 to 2018. Faust is the author of several books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

–Malcolm

‘I’ve Got it Bad and That Ain’t Good’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Music

While the rest of the USA was listening to “Chances Are,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and  “All I Have to Do is Dream” in the 1950s, I was learning about jazz and the blues from my father’s large collection of 78 rpm records. My musical “philosophy” (haha, like I had one) came from a 1931 song by Duke Ellington, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t got that. . .” Well, you know.

I’ve always preferred jazz and blues to just about everything else except, perhaps, songs by Pete Seeger and the Weavers. Sooner or later, when moving to a new town, I would find the local jazz station even though it never earned as much money as the so-called “top forty” stations.

So naturally, I liked “I’ve  Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” by Duke Ellington and Paul Francis Webster released in 1941.  A lot of other people liked it, too, since everybody who was anybody sang it, including Cannonball Adderley, Ivie Anderson, and Louis Armstrong. Cher, who–like me–wasn’t born when the song came out, sang the version I liked the best on her 1973 album “Bittersweet White Light.” Many think this album contains some of her best work, though it didn’t do well.

I ended up liking Cher a lot, probably because of this album, surprising everyone knew me.

I still like jazz, blues, and ragtime best which means, I guess, that–music-wise–I’ve still got it bad and that ain’t good.

–Malcolm

My musical preferences usually make their way into my novels.

Jimmy, I’m sure there’s a woman to blame

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life, writing

I tell you what, people younger than me are dropping like flies, and I wonder if it’s time to worry.

Buffett

Today the mayor of Margaritaville has left the beach, flying high and away up into the clouds in his wonderful HU-16 Albatross (a plane I knew well from my time in the Navy), the “Hemisphere Dancer.” I want to say thank you for all the songs and that  “drunken Caribbean rock ‘n’ roll” flavor that fueled them. But he knows we liked the music and would have moved to Margaritaville if we could.

I’m not sure whether I should mourn his passing with a pitcher of margaritas or a six-pack of LandShark Lager. He’s left behind a legacy of songs, books, and business ventures. So he leaves us with a lot of what he knew and loved.  He was part of the “Silent Generation,” though that term doesn’t describe him! And yet, I think of the knowledge lost as members of this generation fly away–as useful as albatrosses, the younger generations believe–that will never be known again.

The manatees say, “So long, and thanks for all the sea grasses, mollusks, worms, crustaceans, bivalves, and fish.

What we know, some say, is out of date and irrelevant. I doubt that. But that’s life. Rest in peace, Jimmy.

—Malcolm

Annie, that Pilgrim, whose words I go back to again and again

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn authors, writing

“I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters. I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.” – Annie Dillard, from her website

I was browsing through the Poets & Writers website today when I saw that a profile of Annie Dillard, by John Freeman, “Such Great Heights”  from 2016 was displayed from the magazine’s archives.  Freeman writes, “You can almost hear the pops and fizzes of combustion as the flue clears and Dillard’s mind gulps down the oxygen it has been feeding on for years—books. It’s something to behold. Here is the sensibility that emerged from a white-glove Pittsburgh background because she read a novel about Rimbaud and wanted her mind to be on fire too. Here is the writer who pulled it off, chiseling out Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), the Walden of our time, in nine months because she read a book on nature and felt she could do better. And thus Dillard wrote that great, elegant prayer to the seasons, largely at night, in the Hollins College library in Roanoke, Virginia, powered by chocolate milk, Vantage cigarettes, and Hasidic theology.”

Tinker Creek in Virginia

If there were a website where readers who love a writer’s words and philosophy could sign up to become an official kindred spirit, I would have gone there in 1974 when the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek emerged to sign my name on Dillard’s kindred spirit page. He work has influenced by thinking .

In Tinker Creek, she writes, “It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

Yes to all that. And to her words in such books as Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. She taught for 21 years at Wesleyan University where I wish I’d been a student to audit her classes. If you read a lot, you will most likely find your Annie Dillard, the friendly author you wish lived next door with the porch light on..

We’re about the same age, she and I,  and there’s much we could have talked about.

—Malcolm

Oops, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

I think the first time I did that was when my grandparents insisted that I was to eat a turkey drumstick at Thanksgiving dinner when I was in junior high school. I wasn’t prepared for the size of the thing or the thin bones hidden inside it. But, I finally ate the whole thing. In one meal. Before it got dark.  And, food wise, that wasn’t to be the last time that happened.

This time, it’s the novel in progress which, if I don’t get my teeth sharpened up, could turn into a real turkey and that would tick off my understanding publisher. So, my apologies for the length  of time that’s passing by since the release of my last book, Fate’s Arrows in 2020. Like a turkey drumstick to a guy used to fried chicken, Cornish game hens, and squabs, this book was supposed to be essentially a short novel or a long novella. But once I got into it, I realized that–as a continuation of the story in Fate’s Arrows–it was a lot longer and more complex than I expected.

If I were the kind of person who outlined novels, before I write them, I wouldn’t be telling you why Avenging Angels isn’t ready, or won’t be ready soon. But, I’m not the kind of person who outlines novels before I write them because I don’t know what’s going to happen or here things will go until I start writing them. I follow the stories like a blind man who doesn’t know the size of the drumstick on his plate.

As it turns out, the drumstick on my plate weighs nearly two pounds and comes from an Ostrich. What fresh hell is this? According to  a 2016 story in the Chicago Tribune, “Thirty years ago, farmers and breeders flocked to the ostrich business, oversaturating it. But without consumer demand to match and a vulnerability to scams, the industry plummeted as quickly as it had prepared to take off.” Bottom line, nobody around here sells Ostrich meat. So, I had not reason to suspect that dark angels would put such a thing on my plate.

If Ostrich really tastes sort of like venison, I would like it. So I hope that when I finally get enough spare room inside my mouth to chew what I ended up with, I’ll make better progress with this book. And, when it comes out, I hope you’ll like it even thought it will probably be darker and grittier than Fate’s Arrows. Let’s face it, there’s no good way to write a light-hearted book about the KKK because it’s members in Florida where my novels are set were more cruel than Shortfin Mako Sharks and quite likely lived next door. Your friendly sheriff was probably a member.

So, I’m still here, still writing, and still hoping I’ll finish this drumstick in the near future.

—Malcolm

How to ruin the plot of a TV series

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn television, writing2 Comments

Well, there are lots of ways, actually, but I’m thinking of “1883′ which ran initially in 2021 with great work by actors  Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Sam Elliott, and Isabel May. The series about a wagon train heading west was very gritty, but the dialogue and plot were exceptional. Okay, I’ll warn you that there are spoilers here.

The most interesting plot line was the development of the Isabel May character (Elsa) who was the exact opposite of most young women of the era. She could ride better than most of the men and learned to help move the cattle since there was a shortage of men to manage the herd. She had a love affair with a Comanche warrior (Sam)and planned to return to him when the wagons reached their destination.

This was the best character development I’d seen in a Western in a long time, and I’m sure most viewers anticipated her reunion with Sam. However, in episode eight of ten, she is shot during a battle with a Lakota band that thinks people from the wagon train attacked their camp while the men were gone. Her arrow wound is too bad to heal and she ends up dying in the last episode.

I was furious. The writers and producers spent the entire series developing this character (Elsa) and then they kill her off at the last minute. I cry foul. The series should have given us a legitimate ending rather than getting rid of the woman who became the main character.

–Malcolm

Saving Overcrowded National Parks

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn National Parks, writing

I just finished entering online comments into a Glacier National Park survey about how to do things better in managing the park. If you’ve visited Glacier recently, you know that all roads in the park are controlled by a reservation system that dictates when you can drive from one place to another. I can understand why the plan was tried, but I think it made everything worse.

I believe that the first duty of the National Park Service is to protect the land along with its flora and fauna. Overcrowded parks–such as Glacier–tell me that the NPS’ focus has gotten skewed to (1) providing unlimited access to everyone, (2) managing overcrowding rather than preventing it, and (3) Choosing recreation over the preservation of a pristine area.

I do not think the NPS should create chaos in overcrowded parks by instituting reservation systems about who can use which roads and when. This accentuates the overcrowding and ruins the visitors’ experience rather than improving it.

Since nothing else seems to work, I proposed banning private vehicles on park roads and using a shuttle service, raising prices on overcrowded parks and lowering them on underutilized parks, and not changing the roads/trails to accommodate the most invasive species (man) at the expense of the landforms and natural cycles of the area.

The first duty is protecting the land within the park. Allowing people into it is way down on the list of priorities.

–Malcolm

Those tricky map questions

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn geography

I disliked my University’s mandatory ROTC requirement which, in reality helped very little since I ended up in the Navy.  But they had a map reading course which was very helpful when I hiked and climbed mountains in the West. What I realized over the years is that most Americans know very little about geography because everything’s so far away in the USA that they never see it.

So, it’s not surprising that most of us miss map-orientned questions, fairing quite poorly compared to the Europeans. Hell, if you live in Texas and start a road trip you’ll be a senior citizen before you get outside the state.

At any rate, how to do you expect people to answer the question “what is the northern-most, southern-most, eastern-most, and western-most that in the Union?

For southern-most, people will say Florida. Nope, it’s Hawai’i, specifically Ka Lae on the Big Island. People find that hard to see since Hawai’i is usually placed in a subsection of US maps, so its geographical relationship to the rest of the country isn’t clear.

If people remember Alaska, they’ll say it’s the northern-most state. If they forget Alaska, they’ll say “Maine.”

Asking about the western-most state gets you a lot of answers.  A lot of peole will blurt out “California” and then sheepishly say, “oh yeah, it’s Hawai’i.” Both answers are wrong. Alaska’s islands stretch out farther west than Hawai’i. If you compare the location of the Aleutian Islands on a map–better yet, a globe–you’ll see they’re farther west than Hawai’i. Once you see the map, it’s obvious that Alaska is farther west than Hawai’i.

When asked about the eastern-most state, most people will say “Maine.”  It’s not a bad answer other than the fact that it’s wrong. According to the sporcle blog: “Remember how we said Alaska was the westernmost state in the entire US? It is true. Cape Wrangell, Alaska, is 172 degrees 27 minutes east.

“Notice anything odd about those degrees? Remember, we said there are certain technicalities to account for when it comes to farthest directional points. Cape Wrangell is so far west, it actually crosses the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere. So technically, Alaska is also the easternmost point in the US.”

Alaska takes the prize. Who knew? If you win any money with these questions in bar bets, please send my share to me via Paypal.

—Malcolm

I’ll drink swill but I don’t want it messed up

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life in general

I would like to drink the best red wines, but, dang, they’ll cost more than the rest of the meal. Of late, restaurants have started serving red wine chilled. That’s a sign of the end of times. When I restaurant brings me a glass of ice-cold red wine, I tell the waiter or waitress that the menu needs a warning label saying that the red wine’s coming out cold. The biggest argument I got into with a restaurant about chilled red wine happened when they told me the wine keeps longer if they store it in a refrigerator. Nope, that ruins it. They probably didn’t change their ways.

It’s gotten easier to order a dirty martini and have my un-messed-up wine when I get home.

“Swill,” by the way, is a magnum (1.5-liter) bottle of grocery store wine that sells for around ten bucks. I refuse to buy the so-called standard 750ml bottle because it’s a bad value in terms of price. Bring me a bottle of Pinot Noir and I’ll be happy. Sea Smoke Southing Pinot Noir will do nicely because it tastes great and is way outside my budget.

Switching gears, I have a strong aversion to restaurants that want to bring me Scotch whisky on ice. That is a GIANT sacrilege. And forget that one drop of water to “open up the taste.”  And the whole “splash of water” you can just not mention it.

My favorite Scotch is single malt Talisker, heavy on the peat and the smoke with a great slogan on their website:  “On the shores of the Isle of Skye, where rugged coastlines meet the raging sea, you find adventure in a bottle. Talisker single malt scotch whisky captures the elemental wildness and unadulterated beauty of its birthplace to give you a taste of Skye in every sip.” That’s heaven in a bottle of, say, Talisker Storm.

If you’ve been around a while, you might remember the days when bourbon was pretty much-considered rot gut. It’s improved over time, but I cannot drink it straight. I have to hide it in a cocktail. Or even dump it into a glass of Coke.

My wife once told me that I always head toward the expensive stuff. She’s right. I drink swill wine at home, but it’s far from the best of the best of the best. Needless to say, I seldom buy Talisker and will settle for Famous Grouse. It gets good reviews and doesn’t cost more than my house.

—Malcolm