Left of the Dial

never understood in its own time

So I'm still halfway through my first pot of coffee when Top Management starts reading a beloved book to the youngest two.

The current chapter opens with "There they were out in the schoolyard—free!"

I immediately mutter, “no one’s really free.”

They all look up at me with…expressions. The Golden Weasel and the Brawn say sternly, “father.”

This is why it's best for all concerned if I go away to drink my coffee. 

if you give a mouse some literature

So Top Management is discussing a Mary Oliver poem with the Golden Weasel and the Brawn and, as so often happens, she mentions something Joyce Carol Oates once said about the writings of James Joyce and how that tied in with Virginia Wolfe which led to Marcel Proust and it just goes to show that if you give a writer a poem to discuss she's going to want a cookie. 

twist

"Hey," I say, heading downstairs. "It's 8:15, so almost time for the boys to get ready for bed, so I can read. Tonight we get to the part where Strider kills Pippin!" 

From behind me I hear girls shriek "Daddy!" in perfect outraged three-part harmony.

It's the little things. 

busted

I've finished reading the bedtime story to the three youngest—my fourth, I think, and final time through The Lord of the Rings, he said sadly—and I finish with the family ritual my late, great brother John introduced me to, which is asking each of the kids to say something good about their day; Johnny had his boys list three things each, I believe, but I've got way more kids, and their lives are apparently exponentially less rich, because they sometimes struggle to come up with a single good thing about their day. (To be fair, if I allowed The Brawn to list video game-related stuff, he'd never have any problem listing a dozen good things about his day.) 

They each cough up a good thing about their day, and then Max—who's taken to sitting in on our evening's reads–adds hers. I call into the blue room (which isn't blue) to ask Bean for her good thing about the day, as usual, and she chimes in. I don't bother asking the Rose, because although I can't see her, she's always got headphones on at this time of night and can't hear us anyway. 

As we're wrapping up, the Brawn does something that annoys the Golden Weasel. "Please don't," she says, the words polite, the tone sharp, and although I didn't see what happened, I saw her twist her body in a way that would indicate he'd probably poked her in the back with a toe. 

It's late, I don't feel like getting into it, since I'm heading downstairs and he's about to sleep and she's going to sweep the first floor, so I push the parental guidance off for a future date, another day, hopefully when his mother's on duty. But without even really thinking about it, I find myself humming the bassline to MC Hammer's best-known song (said bassline, of course, having been...let's say "borrowed" from Rick James). 

Suddenly, from the blue comes a surprising voice yelling "Can't touch this!" 

There's a stunned silence as we process what just happened. 

Then I yell at the Rose, "You can hear us?!" 

There's another pause, briefer this time, then she bursts laughing. "Four years of pretending I couldn't hear you so I didn't have to come up with a good thing of the day down the drain! 'Can't Touch This' is just too powerful!"

not dancing?

So Top Management sent me this just now: 

I laughed. 

She added, "I would have uttered some choice profanities at the screen but the kids were in the kitchen." 

 

very much pro-creation

There is almost nothing in the world that makes me happier than walking into her studio and seeing Top Management writing.

Unfortunately, if I'm seeing it, it usually means I just interrupted her and I only realize it when she slowly looks up at me with eyes that are a thousand miles away. 

Whoops. 

(And experience has taught me that frantically whispering "go back to writing! go back to writing!" isn't nearly as helpful as you might expect.) 

[image stolen from an ebay listing which seems to have been taken down long long ago]

she is not large...and yet...

I walk into the room just in time to hear Top Management say, as she's sorting stacks of papers into various piles, "I've gotten them all mixed up." 

 

I say, "what, your emotions?"

 

She says, "yes, that's right. My emotions are all a jumble." 

 

The Brawn says, "Because you contain multitudes?" 

the perils of being a self-taught reader

The Brawn says, "So. Dad. Scrohjum and...what's the name of the one who always yells 'that's it!'?"

I am momentarily poleaxed by the name I cannot possibly have heard properly. I therefore reply, cogently, "...what?" 

"What's the name of the one who always yells, "that's it!"? 

I look down at the book he's holding and things become slightly more clear. 

"Lucy." 

"Right. So. Scrohjum and Lucy are talking and" and he proceeds to recount to me a strip he's just read which he loves. 

I very much look forward to reminding him of this when he's a teenager and feeling (mainly correctly) that his dad's an idiot. 

another persuasive argument

The Golden Weasel: Me and Rose both agreed that you should always color code books.

Me: Why is that better than sorting by author? 

She gives an utterly baffled look.

The Golden Weasel: Because it's so much prettier. 

woozing, or, the perils of boox larnin'

"Dad? Have you seen a book called...I don't know what it's called. It had a guy in it named Mister Martin."

"Is that the name of it?"

"I think so."

"Then, no, pal. I'm afraid I don't."

"I don't know where it got to. I was reading it last night and I put it down on my chest and it just disappeared."

"Ah." I walk over and pick off the shelf the book that he fell asleep reading, with the result that said book ended up on his face.

"Do you mean this one?"

"Yes!"

"So by 'Mister Martin' you meant 'Doctor Boox'?"

"Hey!" he says, aggrieved. But as he can't find anything to be legit aggrieved about, he laughs and starts reading.

modern expectations

So I walk into the kitchen and see Max at the table, eating breakfast...while reading a book. And my first thought is, "oh no! What happened to your phone?!"

the sound of a preposition

We've got those word magnets on our fridge. We have at least the basic starter kit and the Shakespeare expansion pack and maybe another. We've had them for nearly as long as we've had kids, or maybe even longer? We go through phases as a family where we'll be more active and then through dormant periods, and even some dark times where the fridge has been free of "besmirch" and "verily" for a few months, until the kids find them and dig them out again. We've gotten some great sentences and phrases over the years and more than a few that made no sense but amused the heck out of the younger contingent.

So I'm opening the fridge today and I knock one onto the floor. The Golden Weasel says, without looking up from the kitchen table where she's been drawing, "what word was that?" 

"Um..." I say, bending down and picking it up. "To. Tee Oh." 

"Mm," she murmurs, nodding, still not looking up. "That's what I thought. It sounded like that." 

juxtaposition

The Golden Weasel, uncharacteristically, grows weary of drawing and drifts over to the couch. She picks up a book and begins reading—and, characteristically, it's aloud. Which is fine, delightful, even; I'm going to be very sad when I one day realize she doesn't do that anymore.

I'm only dimly aware of her voice chirping away in the background, as I'm working on Important Things, and as I'm characteristically much closer to the speakers currently pumping out music at an uncharacteristically reasonable volume. 

Max, uncharacteristically home from college but characteristically on her computer, IMs me from nine feet away. 

what're we listening to? bc i'm really enjoying the contrast we've got going here between the music and the story we're being read.

I pause and listen. 

This is what we're being read:

And this is what we're listening to: 

Talk about worlds colliding or, perhaps, two great tastes that taste great together. 

ancient history

 

"Dad, you know that book I was just reading?"

"I do." 

"Do you know when it was written?"

"I don't." 

"In the eighties." 

"Wow. It's that old?" 

"Yes. Can you believe it?"

The mind boggles.

 

 

(the actual ancient tome in question)

middle-aged wasteland

So for the past four days, I've been reading Earth Abides, the utterly gripping 1949 post-apocalpytic novel by George R. Stewart each night before I fall asleep. And every night the same thing happens. At some point I wake up enough to look at my good lady wife sleeping next to me and think, "oh thank GOD! Another human! I'm not alone any more!" And thus relieved of my horrific solitude, I drift back off to sleep.  

And a few hours later, at daybreak, to the familiar sounds of my boy's always frantic first thing in the morning ablutions in the kids' bathroom, I wake just enough to turn and make sure she's still there. And then I think, "oh...it was just a dream." And then I gaze at her a second longer and I think a tiny bit more and realize, "oh, wait...no, it wasn't." 

Blah

So the other night I discovered, to my shock and horror, not just that I had seven billion children, but that I also had not one single copy of any of the myriad collections of Gary Larson's The Far Side in the entire house. Seven billion to zero is a ratio wildly out of whack. 

This was insanity. This was horrifying. This Would Not Do. 

Stunned at how terrible Top Management and I clearly are as parents (read: me), I immediately went to Amazon. And then quickly shuttered that idea and went to our library system where I found dozens, scores, hundreds of thousands of copies of various Far Side collections...almost all of which were checked out. 

But! Not absolutely all of them. A little baksheesh may have greased the computer system's virtual palm, and mere days later, I get a notice that the first two galleries are in. 

I rush to the library like a bat outta heck, grab the books, make a run for the car, get tackled by the librarian who must run the 100m in under 10, go back inside, check them out like the good law-abiding citizen I am, run back to the car, drive home in a safe and secure manner, come into the house, and casually say to the first child I see (which just happens to be The Bean), "hey, here you go—you might find this mildly amusing." 

I observe her silently reading for two, five, ten minutes: no smiles, no chuckles, just page solemnly turned after page. Finally, I can stand it no longer. 

"So," I say, as casual as all get-out,"How is it?'

She takes a long moment to look up, her eyes finally focusing. "It's awesome." 

She pauses. "It's very odd," she adds. "And he's very fond of cows." 

This'll do. 

But then, paydirt. Five minutes later, she suddenly yells, "Hey! Ginger!" 

I look up, confused. 

She turns the book around to show me the page, an enormous grin lighting up her face, and one of our family's most quoted pop culture moments clearly on display. 

Okay. Maybe we (read: Top Management) haven't done absolutely everything wrong. 

Slytherin House: incubator of evil for 1200 years!

So it's been more than a little while since I last posted about my favorite series in the entire world. But I read this interesting piece on Harry Potter. It's fairly short, so you should click through and read the whole thing, but the part that really made me think was this:

The biggest problem begins with that obnoxious Sorting Hat. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that every last one of the major heroic characters gets sorted into Gryffindor, the “brave” house. Nearly all of the villains get sorted into Slytherin, the “ambition” house.

Already you’ll notice that things are getting a little bit vague, as “ambition” is a substantially more nebulous concept than “hard work” or “cleverness.” Well, that or it simply comes packaged WITH all those other virtues. But the point is our heroes and villains all get lumped in together.

So, not only is bravery implied to be the best of all virtues, but it also apparently trumps intelligence or hard work. Fine, sure. We’ll just go with that. And we’ll also try to ignore the blatant violation of these sortings that occur over and over again through the series.

I get that this is just a way to make a “hero” house and a “villain” house. Normally I’d write this off as typical fantasy-movie simplicity. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and a host of others do the same thing; they create a group of cartoonish baddies to embody the opposition to our hero. We’re not meant to really question it. Evil is evil.

The problem with doing this in the Harry Potter universe is the books and movies are obsessively focused on tearing down the walls built by prejudice and groupthink.

[...]

So why, then, is it just like… totally cool to write off as bad every single person chosen to be in Slytherin House?

I mean, I know WHY. Slytherin students are constantly undermining their classmates, and adults who graduate from the house tend to go on to undermine the rest of the wizarding community. It’s stated as fact that no evil wizard ever walked the earth that WASN’T a member of the house at some point.

And there 'tis.

Assuming that the bolded part is correct—and I don't recall it ever being stated that baldly, although I'm not much of a HP scholar and, either way, it is the clear implication—it seems to me the real question here is one of cause-and-effect, or maybe chicken-and-egg: are these kids—and that's all they are, just little, little kids at the beginnging—inherently bad, or are they already lost causes...or does Slytherin itself cause them to all go over to the dark side? And if that's the case, how on earth could Dumbledore and all his predecessors possibly justify keeping the house around? 

twist!

So Top Management is having a crisis because she's a writer and that's what creative people do. 

No problem. I've been a (theoretically) creative person for 20+ years and, much more important, in addition to being married to a legitimate artist, I've been an editor for much of that time and have dealt with creative people and I get it. I know how these things go. I know that it's not unusual for even the most creative of creative people to hit a wall, for whatever reason, and worry that they've lost it, that this isn't working out, that they're never going to be able to do anything worthwhile again, that that's it, it's all over. Usually, a little talk gets them off the ledge and a (generally very productive) day later, it's as though it never happened and I mean that: often I think that just a day later they literally don't recall feeling so deathly despondent no more than one day earlier. 

So Top Management and I talk but it's the witching hour, as she used to call it. It's the evening, and the kitchen needs to be cleaned, the dinner dishes done, homework overseen, hair washed, laundry folded and put away, kids slammed into bed, the whole shebang. So I listen for ten minutes but then I just, I have to go, I really do, but I promise to come back in just a bit and angst with her some more. 

Fifteen minutes later I walk in, things semi-taken care of, temporarily. "I'm ready to be understanding!" I announce heroically. 

She slowly and silently looks up at me as though I've got three heads, one of which is speaking Mandarin, another Swahili and the third vomiting blood. "What's wrong?" I asked, actually worried for the first time. 

She just keeps staring for a few more very long seconds. "I'm writing," she finally manages to mutter, after painfully switching from the right hemisphere to the left in order to be able to process and answer my question. 

All righty then. 

Man, I'm good. 

Artists Who Hate America

I love the internet.

I just read the following comment:

do the lirics to Springsteens song 
" born in the USA" bother anybody else besides me???

And I wanted to say:

Yes! Thank you! I thought I was the only one!

Although, you know what's even worse? Have you ever read The Grapes of Wrath? Oh my goodness! You won't belieeeeeve the way America is portrayed. 

It's shameful, really. 

UPDATE: Ah, now I see why the lirics bothered the aforementioned internet poster. 

It always goes back to Glenn Beck, doesn't it? What we do without him? 

100 Greatest Novels

I grabbed this here list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1900 from the aptly named List of the Day.

1.     ULYSSES by James Joyce
2.     THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.     A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
4.     LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
5.     BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
6.     THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7.     CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
8.     DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
9.     SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
10.  THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

11.  UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
12.  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
13.  1984 by George Orwell
14.  I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
15.  TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
16.  AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
17.  THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
18.  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
19.  INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
20.  NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

21.  HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
22.  APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
23.  U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
24.  WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
25.  A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
26.  THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
27.  THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
28.  TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29.  THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell

30.  THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
31.  ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
32.  THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
33.  SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
34.  A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
35.  AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
36.  ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
37.  THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
38.  HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
39.  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
40.  THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene

41.  LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
42.  DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
43.  A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
44.  POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
45.  THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
46.  THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
47.  NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
48.  THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
49.  WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
50.  TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

51.  THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
52.  PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
53.  PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
54.  LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
55.  ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
56.  THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
57.  PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
58.  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
59.  ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
60.  THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy

61.  DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
62.  FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
63.  THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
64.  THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
65.  A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
66.  OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
67.  HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
68.  MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
69.  THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
70.  THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell

71.  A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
72.  A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
73.  THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
74.  A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
75.  SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
76.  THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
77.  FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
78.  KIM by Rudyard Kipling
79.  A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
80.  BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh

81.  THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
82.  ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
83.  A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
84.  THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
85.  LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
86.  RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
87.  THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
88.  THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
89.  LOVING by Henry Green
90.  MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie

91.  TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
92.  IRONWEED by William Kennedy
93.  THE MAGUS by John Fowles
94.  WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
95.  UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
96.  SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
97.  THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
98.  THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
99.  THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington 

I believe I have read nine of these, but there are at least a few more that I started and never finished...and at least half a dozen I was supposed to read in college but didn’t. I would love to have read them all...I think. Looking at it again, I realize how much I disliked several of the ones I did read. I mean, Angle of Repose was brilliant. Just stunning. On the other hand, The Magus? Gimme a break. Sucked. Suh-huh-huh-hucked. 

Not that I’m opinionated or nothin’. 

Out, damn Dore!

Well, this is interesting.

J.K. Rowling has outed one of the main characters of her best-selling Harry Potter series, telling fans in New York that the wizard Albus Dumbledore, head of Hogwarts school, is gay.

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night in her first U.S. tour in seven years, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected -- that she "always thought Dumbledore was gay," reported entertainment Web site E! Online.

Rowling said Dumbledore fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was "terribly let down" and went on to destroy his rival.

That love, she said, was Dumbledore's "great tragedy."

"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," she said.

The audience reportedly fell silent after the admission -- then erupted into applause.

I must say, while the evidence was unmistakably there—it was pretty damn blatant—I didn't really take it into account when thinking about the last two books in the series. And one of my biggest problems was how incredibly out of character the young Dumbledore was revealed to have acted. I felt that was a tremendous mistake on Rowling's part, designed to add depth and complexity but in reality merely tarnishing yet another hero, so that in the end there was no one unambiguously heroic—hell, by the end, I barely thought there was anyone truly likeable. Certainly not Harry and with the revelation that (SPOILER!) Dumbledore had at least temporarily flirted with, essentially, magical Aryanism, not even ol' Albus, greatest wizard of all time and kindly father figure.

Ah, but love? Love can make us out wildly out of character and leads oh so many of us to do things which are incredibly stupid and frankly inexplicable later. Why, just look at the normally quite rational and brilliant Top Management and her one glaring blind spot as regards love.

I still think the series sadly and unnecessarily flawed. But I'm certainly more than willing—happy, in fact—to admit it may not be quite as disappointing as I'd previously thought.

What Kind of Reader Are You?

But what if you've read every book in TWO of the catagories they gave you?

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Stranger in a Strange Land

Wow. This I did not expect. Reckon I'll have to read something by him now, huh? [Like a knife to the heart of one loyal Left of the Dial reader was that admission.]

Which Author's Fiction are You?

Robert Heinlein wrote you - you stranger in a strange land, you.
Take this quiz!

H/T: Everybody Knows

Fifth Sentence Meme

From the redoubtable KC at the wonderful Cabbage Patch comes the following meme:

Grab the nearest book.
1. Open it to page 161.
2. Find the fifth full sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
4. Don't search around looking for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

Here's mine:

"He wanted to be noticed."

Sheesh. As if everyone won't immediately know what book that's from…

Them what got blogs and feel like playing, go fer it; either post your answer and/or link in the comments or just post at your own joint. Them what don't but do, leave your answer down in the comments, yo.

It's All About Meme

So. The redoubtable Top Management tagged me with this here meme a while back (as in, about eight damn months ago) and, in my oh speedy way, I finally responded. Aren't you lucky?

1. One book that changed your life?
Batman: The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. The single-greatest Batman story ever (followed by Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli). A relatively straight-forward story about the Batman and the Joker and the way their fates are inextricably intertwined, yet with incredibly sophisticated but crystal-clear storytelling, perfect characterization, immaculate pacing and phenomenal dialogue, all brought to life by the finest art any Batman book has ever had (although Mazzucchelli’s art for Batman: Year One comes damn close).

The Killing Joke led me to other—honestly, superior—works, such (in order of discovery) Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta and Miracleman (as well as, much later, after they’d been written, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and so many others). He is not only one of the finest writers of the past thirty years, he’s one of the most important, something which will, I suspect, be blindingly obvious in another thirty years.

2. One book you have read more than once?
One? In honor of his passing, I'll go with Welcome to the Monkey House, my favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, which I’d guess I've read a half-dozen times at least—and a few stories from it as recently as yesterday. In fact, I read stories from it out loud to Top Management while she rocked Max to sleep as a newborn. Because what says familial bliss and romance like a Vonnegut story?

I've also read the books in Fred Chappell's series of novels about Joe Robert Kirkman and his family—I Am One of You Forever, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You and Look Back All the Green Valley I don't know how many times, and each time they get more magnificent than the last...and they're magnificent from the first; I've actually read a few of the chapters to the girls as bedtime stories, and did so just last night. His tales are as accessible as any pulp writer’s, but as befits North Carolina’s poet laureate, his prose is luminous. Innerestingly, actually, his first chapters tend to be much more challenging, often quite dense, in stark contrast to each novel’s subsequent chapters, almost as though he’s testing the reader, making sure they’re up to the task, a sort of “you want to play, you gotta pay” thang. It is well worth the effort, to put it mildly. Gorgeous, hysterical, haunting works of art.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Oh, what the hell. I'll cheat and go the easy (but truthful) route and say the collected works of William Shakespeare. Either that or some sort of survivalist’s guide since, let’s be honest, it’s obvious I wouldn’t last two weeks otherwise.

4. One book that made you laugh?
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I don’t think I've ever laughed that hard at a book. Although I do recall reading some Paul Zindel book in eighth grade (during geography, which may explain why I failed geography) and being unable to keep from laughing hysterically at one point, which kinda blew my cover of Assiduously Studying the Major Exports of Guatemala.

5. One book that made you cry?
Across the Puddingstone Dam. I've read it five times and it’s made me cry every damn time. Also All the Places to Love, which is sheer poetry.

But Puddingstone's even better.

6. One book you wish had been written?
A final chapter to the His Dark Materials trilogy that was remotely worthy of the first installment. And, of course, anything else by J.R.R. Tolkien, especially, say, a huge collection of short stories featuring our beloved characters; the scene he wrote which was collected…in the Silmarillion maybe?...showing Gandalf in an inn talking to Thorin, and first broaching the idea of employing a hobbit as a thief was magical. Would that we had an enormous book of such.

7. One book you wish had never been written?
I'll go along with Top Management and say that I’m not comfortable with this question. But I will say that one of my major problems with so much speculative fiction—the hoity-toity name for sci-fi, horror, fantasy, alternate histories and the like—is that authors spend so much time creating these amazing worlds that they’re loathe to leave them. And the result, alas, is often novel after novel which fail to match the initial offerings and instead simply provide diminishing returns. So I guess I'm not going to name names, but I do wish some authors knew when to leave well enough alone, rather than tarnish the reputation of the original works by cranking out such substandard sequels. As Miles said, "Take the horn out of your mouth, [friend]."

8. One book you are currently reading?
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Apparently, I must live a long, long life. S’okay with me. And I'm currently reading The Horse and His Boy to the girls at bedtime.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Got it. It’s been sitting on the night stand since…well, since Virginia. It made the westward trek, it just hasn’t gotten quite as far as mine eyeballs yet.

10. Now tag five people:
I shall not. But if any of my regular Left of the Dialians who are sans blog wanna chime in down in the comments, that’d be awesome. Bring it, yo.

Man o' Steel

So I got a wicked groovy present this week. Well, two, actually, but Top Management says I’m not allowed to talk about one of ‘em.

The other one is this:

How gorgeous is that? It is not only one of my favorite pieces of art ever, it is probably my single-favorite Superman shot of all-time. The juxtaposition of the photorealistic background with the cartoony, European-with-just-a-hint-of-Japanese Superman figure is incredibly powerful.

Not to mention that Superman just plain looks freakin’ cool.

This piece was done by Dave Taylor about a dozen years ago and is, in fact, the first time I ever encountered his artwork; I was so stunned that I hired him on the spot. We went on to do an awful lot of work together, much of which I'm as proud of as anything I've ever worked on, and I’m delighted to be working with him again after a gap of about eight years. And apparently the poor sod’s pleased enough to be working with me that he felt compelled to give me a pretty. I suspect it’s my smooth moves on the dance floor. Gets ‘em every time.

(Actually, he said he sent it to me so I’d finally shut up about the damn thing. Artistes.)

Nietzsche's Family Circus

Left of the Dialian Tom E pointed me to this site. It’s…it’s…you know, just describing it doesn’t really do it justice. It’s two great tastes that taste great together, but that’s not quite right either. It’s as though you combined, say, filet mignon and, I dunno, whipped cream. And it somehow tastes good.

Not that I actually like filet mignon. But you get the point.

Anyhoo, that’s this: random quotes from Nietzsche paired with random Family Circus art.

And it works. Every single time.

Just Us and the Cat

“The fish is not wrong.” Words of wisdom. And one of my favorite phrases ever.

This article is nearly four years old now, but I found myself thinking of it when pal Karen mentioned that she stolen two of the pieces from Left of the Dial, the thief, for classroom use. My rage was mitigated ever so slightly by the fact that I was therefore further influencing yet another young and malleable generation, even if it was in a secondhand sort o’ way. You’d think such brainmolding would get old and yet it really doesn’t. Also soothing me somewhat was the fact that I'd previously stolen both of them for Left of the Dial. Whatever. Shut up.

Anyhoo, here's a very long excerpt, but the entire piece is worth your time.

CAT PEOPLE
by LOUIS MENAND
What Dr. Seuss really taught us
December 16, 2002

The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—”the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.

Every reader of "The Cat in the Hat" will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? Terrible as the cat is, the woman is lucky that her children do not fall prey to some more insidious intruder. The mother's abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make so useless a palliative. The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother's return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment.

This is the fish's continually iterated point, and the fish is not wrong. The cat's pursuit of its peculiar idea of fun only cranks up the children's anxiety. It raises our anxiety level as well, since it keeps us from doing what we really want to be doing, which is accompanying the mother on her murderous or erotic errand. Possibly the mother has engaged the cat herself, in order to throw the burden of suspicion onto the children. "What did you do?" she asks them when she returns home, knowing that the children cannot put the same question to her without disclosing their own violation of domestic taboos. They are each other's alibi. When you cheat, you lie.

[snip]

The cat's improvisations with the objets trouvés in the home he has invaded are obviously an allegory for his creator's performance with the two hundred and twenty arbitrary words he has been assigned by his publisher. The cat is a bricoleur. He has no system—or, rather, his system is to have no system. He is compelled to make meaning from whatever is there. He fails, the bricolage topples, the fish ends up in a teapot; and this hint of semantic instability is expanded on in Dr. Seuss's most difficult work (No. 26 all-time), "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," published in 1958.

"The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is the "Grammatology" of Dr. Seuss. It is a book about language and structure, those Cold War obsessions. That the "Cat" books' appearance coincided with the publication of Noam Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" (1957) and Lévi-Strauss's "Structural Anthropology" (1958) is, as they used to say during the Cold War, no accident. Chomsky's work in linguistics, it might be noted, was supported in part by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force's Office of Scientific Research and Air Research and Development Command, and the Office of Naval Research. Not all of the increase in military spending went into missile research.

Synopsis of "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is easy enough. Abandoned again by their feckless mother, those two sad sacks, Sally and me, are consigned to shovelling snow from a recent blizzard. The cat chooses the moment to make his return. Sally urges her brother to bar his entrance ("Don't you talk to that cat. / That cat is a bad one"). The cat brushes off the brushoff and enters the house, where he is discovered soon afterward in the tub, eating a cake. He is banished from the tub by the boy ("I have no time for tricks. / I must go back and dig"), but when the water is drained a pink stain is left. The rest of the action concerns the problem of getting rid of the stain. It is first transferred, by the cat, to a series of household items, some plainly off limits to the children, including the mother's dress, the father's shoes, and the bed in what is described as "Dad's bedroom" (no doubt a response to the mother's extramarital adventures). Unable to erase the stain, the cat reveals, under his hat, various little cats named for the letters of the alphabet ("He helps me a lot. / This is Little Cat A").

These semiotic felines do exactly what a deconstructionist would predict: rather than containing the stain, they disseminate it. Everything turns pink. The chain of signification is interminable and, being interminable, indeterminate. The semantic hygiene fetishized by the children is rudely violated; the "system" they imagined is revealed to have no inside and no outside. It is revealed to be, in fact, just another bricolage. The only way to end the spreading stain of semiosis is to unleash what, since it cannot be named, must be termed "that which is not a sign." This is the Voom, the final agent in the cat's arsenal. The Voom eradicates the pink queerness of a textuality without boundaries; whiteness is back, though it is now the purity of absence—one wants to say (and, at this point, why not?) of abstinence. The association with nuclear holocaust and its sterilizing fallout, wiping the planet clean of pinkness and pinkos, is impossible to ignore. It is a strange story for teaching people how to read.

When you look through the secondary literature on "The Cat in the Hat," you read that children instinctively respond to the cat's sense of mischief. I wonder how many children really do react that way. My own identification, as a child, was entirely with the fish. I didn't admire his hysteria, of course (very uncool). But I understood what he was trying, with his limited vocabulary, to say, which is that "fun" is only a distraction from the reality of separation and abandonment. Pink snow, and those personified genitalia, Thing One and Thing Two, are no substitute for what we have lost. We don't want to be amused; we don't even want to amuse ourselves. We want to be taken care of.

Later on, in the nineteen-sixties, I, along with many other Americans born around 1952, began to understand the cat's appeal—in particular, the whole Thing One and Thing Two business. The fish, let's face it, was an uptight little dude, a tin-pot Puritan, and the domestic sphere in which he served as resident superego proved, on closer examination, to be a site of exclusion and oppression. New combinations seemed possible—seemed necessary. Maybe bricolage and différance were the way, after all. Misrule became the new rule, and the cat was its cockeyed lord. Having learned to read, we learned to misread. Phonics, which was supposed to make us into superscientists, cooking up formulas for landing those ICBMs right in Khrushchev's kitchen, had unleashed instead the spirit of "anything goes." It was Pinkisme partout.

Dr. Seuss, too, flush with the wealth his contributions to the national security had brought him, fell prey to the countercultural forces that his own cat, one of the Cold War's most potent unguided missiles, had helped set in motion. In 1971, he published "The Lorax," a book about the environment that was much despised by the patriotic timber industry, and in 1984 he brought out "The Butter Battle Book," a work criticizing (of all things) the arms race. "The Butter Battle Book" was attacked in The New Republic for being soft on Communism. That's not the kind of thing people used to say about "The Pokey Little Puppy." Dr. Seuss took the same course as that other doctor who hitched a ride on the baby boom and the government gravy train it rode through school and into college: Dr. Spock. They went pink. (We won't get into the later career of Noam Chomsky.)

But that was then, a long time gone. Now we have something different: we have "anything goes" without the spirit. "Transgression," "subversion," "deconstruction" are praise words bestowed as solemnly as "structure" and "order" once were, little gold stars awarded to rappers and television comics. Cakes on rakes are everywhere. A million cats cavort frantically for our attention. Even the fish has been co-opted (though what choice did he have?). "Enjoy!" cries the fish. "Consume! Everything will be fine when your mother gets home." But the fish is whistling into the wind. The mother has left, and she's never coming back. It's just us and that goddam cat.

Two additional notes:

1) Thing One and Thing Two are not personified genitalia, they’re personified bodily fluids and
B) the stain on the mother’s dress predates Monica and yet could not more clearly be the same thing, unless of course it’s entirely a metaphorical stain which I suppose is possible.

So Ted Geisel was either a Freudian or a pre-cog—take your pick. Either way, it’s just another indication of his underappreciated genius.

Wonder Girls

So I’m sitting on the couch in the living room and I suddenly realize that The Rose is right next to me, having materialized in that way she has, like a cat with a transporter.

She’s looking at me with a small smile, so I say, in my oh so benevolent fatherly way, “Yes?”

She tilts her head. “Does Wonder Girl have a daddy?”

“Uh…” I say, searching my decrepit memory banks for the little I've ever known of Wonder Girl’s twisted continuity. “No. No, I don’t think she does.”

Her small smile because a triumphant grin. “Yes! I knew it!” she hisses, and runs off down the hall.

I am left with a feeling of vague uneasiness the rest of the night.

Alaskan Eye Doctors Go Boom!

I don't know who was searching for "historical fiction alaska explosion opthamologist" but they must have been mighty disappointed when Left of the Dial was one of the first hits.

But now I'm most intrigued. What was this person looking for? Is there really such a book? Can it possibly be as wonderful as it sounds? Is there a market for a book like that? Have I stumbled onto a veritable gold mine of story?

Ah! But suddenly things become at least slightly clearer. You see, the searcher spelled "ophthalmologist" wrong. And that's why he ended up with Left of the Dial as a result (as well as about a hundred other joints). But if he spelled it right, he'd get one hundred times as many results.

Which leads one to suspect I'd misspelled it earlier myself in a previous piece. But obviously that's an impossibility.

Books for NOLA

A small and easy way to help New Orleans (remember it? Big city down south? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?):

The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books to restock the shelves after Katrina.

The books can be sent to:

Rica A. Trigs
Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112-2007

I’ve also heard that the post office will offer a discounted rate to ship items to this address.

H/T: firedoglake

*** UPDATE: Well, wouldja lookit dat? I done forgot to do what I always do in a case like this—check the mighty Snopes first.

Seems that the above information isn’t exactly incorrect…but it ain’t exactly the whole story neither.

So. I reckon if you really wanna help the NOLA library system, as everywhere else, they prefer cash.

So do I, of course. But I’ll also take checks.

And, yeah yeah yeah—if you can only help out one of us, I do believe NOLA should get your dosh first. But if there’s enough to go around…

[Special thanks to the mighty Hools for watching my back on this one. She makes blankets for lizards and yet has time to fact-check blogs...simply amazing.]

They...They Like Me!

oniomania (O-nee-uh-MAY-nee-uh, -MAYN-yuh) noun
Compulsive shopping; excessive, uncontrollable desire to buy things.

Top Management and I do not have opulent tastes. We are, however, gluttons. Not so much for food (well, not usually), however. Books and CDs, on the other hand…oy. We may indeed have a slight case of oniomania, if it’s, in fact, possible to have a slight case of oniomania. We are slight oniomaniacs. We live in a slightly oniomaniacal fashion. We live slightly oniomaniacally.

We try really hard to buy books and CDs new when we can, in order to support the artists who created the works. When it comes to certain authors—Charles Dickens, say—we don’t worry too much about it because, you know, I think he’s doing just fine financially right now.

We certainly do buy a lot of stuff used and make enormous use of our marvelous local library, and even occasionally the UVa library, since life as freelancers tend to leave finances somewhat…tension-filled, shall we say? We tell ourselves that that’s apropos for writers.

But when we can, we buy stuff new as much as usual, just to show some love to our fellow creators. Oh, sure, it’s a drop in the bucket but if enough people make the effort, right? So with U2, f’r instance, it doesn’t make a lot of difference but, hey, with The Replacements or Dinosaur Jr it just might make a noticeable spike. "Say…why are we doing so well in the Blue Ridge Mountains these days?" I can imagine the fine folks in Minneapolis wondering.

This is also why we’re such sticklers about not making copies of officially released albums or accepting them from well-meaning friends. Neither of us are, alas, in a position where we get much mileage out of royalties, but we get some, as I’ll discuss in a moment, and we very much hope someday to get more. Much, much more. Oh so much more. Oodles and boodles more. [Besides, making copies for others is, well...you know...stealing, even when it’s done by a well-meaning friend. But more on that another time.]

So. I received my bi-annual (or is it semi-annual? I can never remember and I’m way too lazy to look it up right now) royalty statement today from DC Comics and as usual the unexpected windfall allows to us buy…well, not a new house or a Lamborghini, but at least a couple of pizzas. And I’m not complaining, mind you—as my former boss used to put it, you already got paid for the work and you weren't expecting anything more, so it’s basically free money. And, hey, a couple of pizzas, man…that’s a guaranteed good time.

But what makes this particular gift so unexpected and so pleasant is that it’s for foreign publishing. Not that I got nothin’ against good ol’-fashioned ‘Murican publishing, by any means. But here in the States, you pretty much print a comic and it’s done. Unless it’s later collected, it’s basically out-of-print after a few weeks. Such is the transient nature of comics.

I have had several things collected, so it’s not all that unusual to get tiny little royalties for them. Not surprisingly, the story I’ve made far and away the most money on (enough for nearly a dozen pizzas, maybe) is also easily one of the two worst pieces of writing I’ve ever done. Well, and gotten paid for, that is. Just horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Nice artwork, though. And it might have been slightly better if I hadn’t had to write the first half the week before Max was born (when Top Management was already a week past her due date) and then finish it the week after Max was born (when I had even less of a clue about both writing and parenting than I do now). Oh, and if I hadn’t had to toss my original ending because it was too good. Seriously. Long story of interoffice politics and, actually, they made the right call, much though it bummed me at the time. Beautiful art, though. Really gorgeous. Much better’n my writing deserved. But then that’s true of even my best stuff. Tim, Brian, Jim, Phil, Rick and all the rest--thanks, fellas!

But that’s not what was in this latest statement. This statement was pretty entirely made up of the reprinting of some of the Gotham Adventures books I did with pal and brilliant artist Tim.

And where were these little gems reprinted? The usual places: England. India. Russia. China. Egypt. Lebanon. And Indonesia.

Much as our nation’s most brilliant jazz musicians often found more receptive audiences in Europe and Asia, so too must I go abroad to be hailed as the genius I (and, alas, only I) recognize myself to be.

I mean, how cool is that? My Batman is in Russia and China and India. It was already in England and Canada, from being printed the first time, and most of it’s been reprinted in Mexico and Argentina. Sometimes France and Germany and Spain and even, if I recall correctly, South Korea (I may not be remembering correctly, however, since Batman doesn’t actually translate very well into Asian cultures, interestingly).

But Egypt? And Lebanon? I mean, I’ve now had my work printed in virtually every one of the biggest and most important countries in the world.

Or, as Top Management put it:

Germans love David Hasselhoff.

But Indonesians love Scott Peterson.

I Want My Name Back

So a loving friend sent me this here link to this fine site. The germane part, of course, is this:

Went to Amazon and plugged "Scott Peterson" into its search engine. There were 253 results. Two hundred and fifty-three. Some of them don’t count, since there’s a children’s book author with the unfortunate name "Scott Peterson," but most of them are about that Northern California guy who was convicted of killing his wife and unborn son.

Okay. Now I can see why someone would think my name was unfortunate, given that little creep what killed his wife and unborn child and who was all over the news for a bizarre amount of time—I mean, even without cable, it didn’t seem like you could swing a resting or perhaps slightly stunned cat without hitting a newscaster talking about the twisted son of a bitch. And I don’t mean to pick on the writer of this blog since, after all, she’s expressing sympathy for me and my plight.

But, you know, I had the damn name first. For quite some time, in fact.

I think I wrote on here a while back about voting in November and how rude the old lady who signed me in was. "Well, there’s a name I certainly wouldn’t want to have," she said loudly to the old lady sitting next to her. I looked at her like she was insane, and she just glared back at me, like I was the damn felon sitting in a cell in California. Bizarre. I’ve also had people tell me with pity, "Hey, it could be worse—your name could have been O.J. Simpson."

Great. Thanks so much.

While I’ve never really liked my name—the name Scott, that is; I’ve always been very fond of the name Peterson—I’m now getting to the point where I’m a bit defensive about it. Although very few people actually make jokes about it. Mainly they just ask if I get a lot of jokes. Which is really pretty considerate.

But now in my dotage I’m able to appreciate that it’s a well-balanced name, sounds okay, and looks classy enough in print, which is a good thing, since there are at least twenty million comics out there with my name in ‘em, and maybe triple that many. So, no, it may not be quite as catchy a name as, say, Batman. But I think it’s okay.

What’s more, there are at least two other writers with the same name, one a writer of joke books and one a journalist who’s written about his experiences in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda. I’m thinking of contacting them and seeing if they’re interested in going to try to get the little punkass murderer to legally change his name; Punkass Murderer has a nicely appropriate ring to it, don’t you think? Or barring that, maybe we’ll just get together and kick his ass.

Since either of those options would require me to actually leave the house, of course, it’s mighty doubtful I’ll really do either. [Because, yes, that’s really the impediment to actually putting this plan into effect.]

But I can also talk big on Left of the Dial. God bless the internets.

One in a Million Half-Full Glasses

So the other night pal Dave said something that got to me thinking. We were discussing the almost unbelievable fact that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded on a 4-track. Given that with Pro Tools you can pretty much have an at least theoretically unlimited number of tracks to work with these days, assuming you’ve got enough computer power, why aren’t there more masterpieces created? Where are the geniuses nowadays? Where’s today’s Bob Dylan? For that matter, where’s today’s Mozart or Beethoven? Or Shakespeare?

But the thing is, the reason we hold up, what, a few dozen artists of that caliber and ask where the successors are, is exactly because those artists were so extraordinary.

There were thousands of musicians composing and performing regularly between 1760 and 1791, yet the only two anyone but the hardest of the hardcore really bothers with these days are Haydn and Mozart. Of the thousands and thousands of baroque composers, the only two anyone really cares about anymore are Handel and Bach…and Handel’s mighty far behind Bach, especially if you take away his Water Music and his Messiah. [Feel free to toss Vivaldi in there if you care to; I’ll not stop you but I won’t join you neither.] We talk about Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Johnson and Marlowe, but the number of times they’re actually performed is equal to but the tiniest fraction of Shakespeare productions.

Something like 96,100,000,000 people have ever lived on the earth. How many of them turned out something as magnificent as the Sistine Chapel? Or The Art of the Fugue? Or To Kill a Mockingbird? Or Abbey Road?

I often write on Left of the Dial about how I see the glass as being half-full. The joke, as anyone who knows me in real life can easily attest, is that I’m actually a guy who almost always tends to see the glass as being half-empty. I try to view it as half-full, but that’s a conscious decision; my first natural inclination is almost always to see it as being half-empty.

So does it suck that we don’t have someone today equal to the greatness of Bach or Beethoven or Shakespeare or the Beatles or Dylan? You bet. But even better is that we ever had them at all, and that thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can still enjoy their genius whenever we want.

One in a million? The Beatles were four out of ninety-six billion, one hundred million.

Each of ‘em was 1 in 24,025,000,000.

And I’m just mighty glad they ever were.

The Other Side o' the Desk

Listen, I’ve been an editor and I’ve been a freelancer. They’re both tough gigs with good parts and bad parts. And while I may enjoy a good round of editor-bashing as much as the next guy (especially if the next guy is an editor—nothin’ better’n bashing someone to their face, I’ve found; that behind-the-back stuff lacks the same thrill), I never downplay what a tough job an editor has. In comics, at least, it’s a position of tremendous responsibility and very little power. And very few make the kinda bucks that’ll make that disparity worth it.

Now, having said that…

I can so feel this guy’s pain. Not least because, in addition to having been on the receiving end of this kind o’ feedback on occasion, I’m pretty sure I dished some of it out back in the day…ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

So how are things going with your Agent or Editor—or What’s a Writer to do?

Ever had one of those weeks? Two of those weeks, three of ....

Agent—The young officer that gets injured, can you eliminate the main character and make him your protagonist instead?
Editor—I love the older cop angle, everything today is slanted towards youth.

Editor—I think you have nailed the terrorist mindset!
Editor—Can you tell the story more from the terrorist perspective?
Agent—Can you show more feelings on behalf of the terrorists?

Agent—I really like the seemingly unconnected murders and the tension that they build!
Editor—Can you perhaps do away with a couple of the murders?

Editor—Your main plot theme of the attack is brilliant very unique!
Agent—My biggest issue is with the main attack it caused me to sigh somewhat in disbelief.

Editor—The part with the young officer is very suspenseful I squirmed as I was reading it!
Review—One undiscovered helicopter-crash victim’s survival made me groan but Clackson stays well within the bounds of wide-eyed anticipation.

Review—In a way, one can believe that terrorists must think in these black-and white terms otherwise they could not continue through with their tasks; tasks they believe are blessed and directed by god.
Editor—Do you really think that the terrorist are that single minded with their only purpose to inflict damage?

Review—There are a couple of delightfully unexpected plot twists. One is a romance angle involving the terrorists.
Editor—The part with the two terrorists romantic involvement didn’t work for me and can maybe be taken out?