Review: Dinner with King Tut

 

Dinner with King Tut is a strange sort of beast: let’s call it an anti-sphinx. Like the sphinx it’s composed of three dissimilar parts—not the face of a woman, the wings of a bird and the haunches of a lion, but science, fiction (but not science fiction) and DIY—where DIY involves the author learning how to knap stones, how to tattoo himself, to style hair like an ancient Roman matron, bake bread for Egyptian pyramid builders, and operate a trebuchet, among other skills once necessary for a precarious survival in different eras at different points on the globe. Also: tanning and trepanning.

And this sphinx not only poses riddles it tries its best to answer them, through the discipline of experimental archaeology. Which, if you (like me) have never heard of this field, you’re in for a series of fascinating discoveries, from a Turkish city where one’s relatives where buried beneath one’s bed to the unusual height of Chinese eunuchs.

Conversation with a comic strip

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

--Michelangelo Buonarroti

I came across this comic strip the other night in my Memories feed on Facebook. It was originally posted by a friend nine years ago. I obviously didn't pay it much attention (and attention is today's coin of the realm), because I gave it a like, but didn't bother to comment.

Consider this reparation. This time I pulled up short and gave the strip careful consideration. What was different? You never step into the same stream twice and all that jazz. I'm late to the party (as usual) on this strip, which is from 2013, and I'm way late on its creator, who's been kicking it at the inkstand since 2001.

I've seen numerous strips by the same cartoonist, the monochromatic stick figures holding a four-panel conversations, more often than not with no attribution, thrown upon the world like orphans at the church door. His name is Tom Gauld. I googled him. He's a Scottish cartoonist, illustrator, and writer of graphic novels. (Is writer the right word? Composer? Creator? Confabulator?) If Schulz's preoccupation was preternaturally adult kids and Gary Larsen's was barnyard animals, Gauld's seems to be writers and books, which seems fitting in this age of meta (and of Meta).

But which is right, Gauld or Michelangelo? Is writing a process of decision, or discovery?

Whole Lotta Love

I remember particularly the first time I heard Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.

It must have been 8th grade--1970. I was with my best friend and his older brother, and his brother's friend, the cool kid who had taught us how to tie-dye tee shirts. (We would later learn how to stress jeans by tying bricks to them and dragging them behind a car;  since none of us had a car at the time, that was more of an aspirational thing.) 

This post is available as audio here on Substack.

The older brother's twin had bowed out. He was a contrarian, into country music at a time and an age when no one was into country music. Although, come to think of it, that whole family had a weakness for country music star Faron Young. Whether that was because he hailed from our hometown or because he was the spokesman for BC headache powders remains to this day a mystery. 

Lawsuits in Munchkinland

Harburg KS-

A new class-action suit filed on behalf of the residents of a small Midwestern town devastated by a killer tornado two years ago raises new questions of influence and accountability for mass media. The suit, filed by citizens of Harburg, Kansas pits the town against MGM Studios, makers of the 1939 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

(The audio version of this post is available here on Youtube.)

In Harm's Way

The plaintiffs claim that MGM "did lull residents into a false sense of security when the tornado was reported, and even encouraged them to remain in harm's way in anticipation of the thrill ride of their lives."

"We always knew the house would pitch if it got hit by a twister, and probably a few of the hinges would unhitch," said Ebenezer Gale, whose home was destroyed by the storm, "but we'd seen the 'Wizard of Oz' dozens of times over the years, so we figured we'd just fetch up on a rainbow and put down somewheres in Munchkin Land. You can't find a vacation that cheap on Priceline.com.”

"Sure we got a storm cellar," said Emily Gale, "Everybody's got a storm cellar, you old fool. But who wants to be cooped up there when you could be visiting the Emerald City gettin' one of them makeovers, and maybe meeting Glinda the Good Witch?" Mrs. Gale had both legs broken by flying debris, and is confined to a wheelchair at this time. “We also lost a cow and several chickens in the storm. Just disappeared. We figure the Munchkins have got ‘em. We want ‘em back. If that wizard wants to play hardball, the president has promised to serve ‘em with tariffs.We believe in only licking American lollipops, anyway.”

In defense of adverbs

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

I'm not much on wrangling over writerly advice. It often seems a pointless exercise. So why get down into the trenches over adverbs here? First because the eight parts of speech are my favorite parts of speech. Second, because I'd like to make a larger point about the word "never" when it comes to doling out advice. A common sense argument, if you will, from someone who has never considered common sense a common attribute among people.

"I seem to be a verb" is Buckminster Fuller's famous declaration. I'll go him one better. I seem to be an adverb. Which is to say, a jack of all trades. For I am not merely an action, a process, I’m a constantly recalibrating and refining process, and this is the definition of a well-used adverb. Yes, "I go through life hurriedly" can be replaced by "I rush through life", but can be further refined as "I rush through life precipitously" or even ""I rush through life precipitously whole heartedly." With nuance come adverbs.

Adverbs are not just the despised -ly words. Here's an adverb for you: here. And there. And everywhere--all adverbs. Of the five journalistic questions, when, what, where, why, and how, adverbs answer four. As a matter of fact, those four are adverbs.There are adverbs of manner, of place, time, degree, frequency, conjunctive, interrogative, and relative adverbs. There are even focusing adverbs. What the hell tis his Pandora's box of adverbs? 

Let's have a quick look.

Review: Falls to Pieces

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

When we think of Hawaii we're apt to picture a lush landscape of surfer-size waves, with green palms shading flower-bedecked hula dancers. That's not the setting of Falls to Pieces, where a savage jungle landscape is at war with developers who would pave paradise and put up a parking lot. It's a foe to be respected by Kati Dawes and her daughter Zoe, who have gone off grid and incognito on the island of Maui, hoping to escape their past. But the past catches up, with devastating results. Author Douglas Corleone spells it out at one point: Paradise is safe only in designated places.

When the story opens, two murders have already occurred, driving the plot forward with the fury of Fates. Kati has the unfortunate habit or luck of putting her welfare in the hands of  treacherous men, so when the kidnapping which is  the axle of this novel takes place, suspects are thick on the ground. Beware: no one in this novel. and I mean absolutely no one, is to be trusted. And Kati's memory is not what it was before she sampled the pharmacopeia from Ativan to Zoloft.