I read the new Joe Lansdale novel, Leather Maiden, this weekend, finishing it this morning. A great crime novel with touches of the trademark Lansdale humor, though not quite as much as in a Hap and Leonard novel. The main character, who has the interesting name Cason, exchanges banter with a few other characters, but outside of those exchanges the book is as serious as sin. Cason is a Pulitzer Prize nominee who was ousted from his position with a Houston newspaper after his boss discovered he’d been having affairs with both his wife and his step-daughter. (The latter is a woman in there 30s, by the way, to keep Cason’s sins from being too bad). Cason is also an Iraq war veteran with OCD issues and an unhealthy obsession with a former girlfriend. He moves back to his home town and gets a job as a columnist with the town newspaper. A file on his predecessor’s computer gets him interested in a missing person’s case—a beautiful co-ed vanished without a trace. As soon as he opens that particular Pandora’s box, all manner of evils come pouring out. There’s one bit toward the end involving the guy who works in the newspaper morgue that felt like too much of a stretch, but other than that, I would say this is one of hisownself’s best works.
We watched CSNY: Deja Vu on Saturday. It’s about a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tour in 2006 that was fueled by Neil Young’s rage over the Iraq War. He had written an album about his feelings and decided to take it on the road just before the ’06 mid-term elections. To give the film some legitimacy, they brought along Mike Cerre, a reporter who had been embedded in Iraq and had also covered Vietnam. In a way, he’s embedded in the tour, too. CSNY has a combined age of about 250, and some of them have aged better than others (though for a guy with someone else’s liver, Crosby’s doing not too bad). Their harmonies aren’t quite as harmonic as they once were (Neil Young’s voice has always been a bit of a fingernails-on-the-chalkboard sound for me). Graham Nash’s voice seems to have held up the best, and Stephen Stills can still tear out an awesome riff on the guitar. The tour is obviously meant to stir up feelings—what amazes me is the conservatives who paid $250 for a concert whose theme is obviously anti-Bush/anti-war were surprised that there was political content in the show! In Atlanta, there is a significant retreat toward the exit when Young strikes up the song “Let’s Impeach the President.” Lots of “if you’re not for us, you’re against us” rhetoric among those who leave the show. (In one funny scene, an entertainment television reporter has a microphone in Young’s face. She says, without a hint of artifice, “Your new song is called ‘Let’s Impeach the President.’ What’s it about?”)
Obviously neither the concert nor the movie will change anyone’s mind about the war, but what was really interesting to me were the parts where Cerre interviewed Iraq War veterans, both about the war and their thoughts about the tour’s message.
Speaking of wars, Big Brother was another yelling spree last night. I like the way Dan is playing the game, though it remains to be seen how far his strategy of playing the weak dishrag can take him. I think he and Memphis are playing the best games so far, though I kinda like Keesha most of the time, too. Tonight I’m going to catch up on Mad Men, which I missed last night. OnDemand rocks.
I did an inventory of my submission log this weekend and discovered a few stories that had been sitting in submission for over a year. One of them was to a dead market, though I hadn’t heard of its demise. Another was to a place that says they don’t issue rejection letters, so I assumed that one was a loss, too. I sent query letters to two others to see if the stories are still under consideration. I got two new stories into circulation, one flash story and one crime story, and submitted the story that had been sitting with the dead market elsewhere. Some of the other places I haven’t heard from state on their website that they are severely backlogged and have closed submissions to catch up, so I’m going to leave them alone for a while.
