The cool things I find in my mailbox…I just got a copy of The Scopes Monkey Trial by Moore and McComas, and it’s a fun read. It’s a slim book, and it is almost entirely photographs from around 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. It’s a visual record of a time and a place and an event, well worth reading.
Now I’m thinking that someday I have to make a trip to Dayton.
The Bloggess brings up an interesting question about comfort books — those books you read multiple times, because they inexplicably make you feel good.
I was just talking with Victor about comfort books…those books that you read over and over because you find them comforting even if you don’t understand why. He thinks I’m insane and possibly I am, but there are certain books I turn to when my head is in a weird place and I need to go somewhere I’ve been before and relax. I’d tried to explain it to him and he almost understood until I started listing a few and then I realized that most of my comfort books are full of murder and angst and bizarreness and are not really what anyone in the world would consider to be a happy or relaxing read. Books like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Geek Love and From the Dust Returned and The Stranger. Worn copies of Bloody Business and Stiff and The 3 Faces of Eve and Alice in Wonderland and pretty much any of the Sookie Stackhouse series. Books that may not make it on my top ten list, but that I compulsively read again and again.
I thought about it, and I mostly lack anything like that — I like newness, so I keep digging up new authors and new stories, and I don’t do much re-reading. But there’s one exception, one book that I dredge up every few years to re-read. It’s probably one you never heard of.
I’ve just discovered the literary works of Mildred Houghton Comfort, a woman who wrote a number of biographies of Important Men of American Capitalism, back in the good old days of the 1950s. William L. Knight, Industrialist. Walt Disney, Master of Fantasy. John Foster Dulles, Peacemaker. Little Punk, the Baby Elephant. She was a prolific supporter of the conservative status quo.
These aren’t exactly popular books any more, but you can still find a few old used copies for sale. She also wrote J. Edgar Hoover, Modern Knight Errant, and there are a few pages from that scanned and available on the interwebs. It’s horrifying.
Disclaimer: I was born in the 1950s, but I was tiny and innocent and unaware and had no idea what was going on. I became conscious in the late 1960s, a much more copacetic decade. This kind of crap was more the product of The Greatest Generation, which I’ve heard was perfect and admirable in all ways, unlike all other generations of Americans.
I haven’t been able to find out much about Ms Houghton Comfort, other than when she lived: 1886-. That emptiness after the en dash is rather disquieting, and lacking in closure.
I’ve read Karen Stollznow’s new book, Hits & Mrs.. It’s fiction, a novel about a skeptical detective. But I need to warn you about two things.
It’s got sex in it. Not the kind of explicit recounting of urological details you’d find in pornography, but the characters are boinking regularly, and enjoying it.
One thing it lacks is reverence for organized skepticism — many skeptics are portrayed as jerks. It’s almost as if the author’s insider familiarity with the skepticism movement has disillusioned her.
Gosh. I imagine every one who reads this site is now horrified and is going to avoid the book.
Chrissy Kolaya, who teaches writing here at UMM, go a nice write-up for her new book in the Chicago Tribune. Her book is Charmed Particles: A Novel
You should read it, and then you should come to the Cafe Scientifique in Morris on 26 January, because she’s the speaker and she’ll be telling us all about it, and taking questions. It’ll be a great start to a new semester!
It’s true: there are far more books in the world that I have not and will not read than books that I have read. I scratched off one yesterday, and here’s another one I can toss in the trash: Rafael Cruz’s promo for his son Ted’s candidacy.
Rafael talks about the dangers of secular humanism and makes a glancing reference to Seven Mountains dominionism, the belief that conservative Christians must gain control over the “seven mountains” of American culture.
In no way, shape, or form was Jefferson implying that the church should be restricted from exerting an influence upon society. On the contrary, the Bible tells us that we are the salt of the earth and light of the world…Doesn’t that suggest that our influence should touch every area of society – our families, the media, sports, arts and entertainment, education, business, and government?”
Like Barton and Lane, Rafael makes his case for the Christian nature of the U.S. government by conflating the Pilgrims and Puritans with the founding fathers who gave us the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution more than 150 years later. Rafael declares that “the concept of separation of church and state is found nowhere in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States of America,” which leads into this:
To understand this clearly, we need to go back four centuries to the time of the first settlers in America. If you lived in England in the early 1600s and were not a member of the Church of England, you would be considered a heretic and subject to persecution. So the early settlers immigrated to the New World in order to freely worship the Lord their God. What a remarkable heritage of religious freedom this exceptional country gives us! The only country on the face of the earth founded on the World of God!
It looks awful and inane. I’m satisfied by a small taste to know that I’d rather not consume the whole feast.
But all the Sam Harris fans who spent the evening dunning me with demands that I have to go read his book, who accused me of intellectual bankruptcy because I dismissed his pompous nonsense out of hand, well, I’m sorry…to be consistent, you now have to go read Rafael Cruz’s A Time for Action. You can’t possibly criticize it on the basis of a few ahistorical quotes snipped out of context, don’t you know.
Yesterday was Christmas, so I did nothing much at all. Well, I did a few things.
I have rediscovered the joy of a pair of good thick wool socks. Seriously, people! Warm wool on a cold day? You cannot go wrong.
We spent the evening in the big city of St Cloud, having a traditional Christmas dinner with our son at a Chinese restaurant.
And I spent most of the day reading a book. Not any of the science books piled up on my desk, but a thriller. I felt a bit guilty about it, but then decided that nah, I get to take a full day off and screw around. It’s good for the brain to take a break. Also, cozy warm feet take an amazing amount of tension out of your life.
If you’ve visited the Pharyngula store, you may have noticed that one of the items on my “What I’m reading now” is Saturn Run
The winners of the World Fantasy Award for 2015 have just been announced, so if you’re looking for interesting reading, there you go.
The winners are given that hideous statuette to the right, a bust of HP Lovecraft. Now we’re all winners, because it has just been announced that the caricature of the goggle-eyed racist will not be handed out in the future — winners in 2016 will get something that they won’t tuck out of sight and turn towards the wall (and here’s another take on the controversy over HP).
I’ve been a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos, but I agree with this change — if it were a statuette of Cthulhu, I would approve, but a statuette of HP Lovecraft the man is honoring the wrong thing, not the creation, but the horrible complicated twisted creator.
, at home.