The Lingering: Skulldiggery Book 3, by DM Gritzmacher (book review)

Probably your favorite bartender / real estate magnate returns (The Quarry, 2023) in an interweaving blend of eras and narratives.

Almost 44 years ago, Russell Stander found something.  Spending summers of his adolescence away from home and friends in Michigan, and instead a season-long visit to his idiosyncratic, elderly aunt in Western Illinois, Rusty is understandably in search of adventure.  As it turns out, he and his cadre of summer friends find more than they bargain for, discovering a mysterious, abandoned graveyard full of dark secrets. 

Stephen King and Peter Straub described the “dreamlike and slightly unnatural… characteristic of borderlands” in their novel Black House, and DM Gritzmacher’s third installment of the Skulldiggery series takes place just a short way down that most awesome (and awful!) of all American borders – The Mississippi River.  The story hops between the present day, the early 1980s, and the turn of the 19^th into the early 20^th Century, with each of the three eras meandering toward each other as the narrative unfolds.  In our modern moment, we find middle-aged bar owner Rusty returning to the small community of Almore, Illinois with his friend and employee, Tom Secrist, a retired police officer.  In the early 80s, we find the same Rusty, 10 years old (give or take), and a group of four friends wandering through the countryside in search of some fun and some adventure.  And eighty years prior to that, a mysterious figure on either side of the border that is The Mississippi (and the turn of that century on either side of 1900) also wandering that same countryside where the boys find themselves we are witness to a sequence of grisly murders told from the perspective of the perpetrator.

It's part Stand By Me and part In Cold Blood, with a dash of co
smic horror, and a world of related stories swirling all around the edges.

Engaging, leaving you hungry for more.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9798986638751

Page Count: 259

Publisher: Piqued

well this is embarrassing...

 So, I've just learned that a previous Roman Numeral J contest has yet to be resolved, and, as I am currently in the midst of a membership drive...

The question is: What is the most recent alcoholic beverage purchased by joel? For the purposes of this quiz, "purchase can be purchased for me by someone else, but the most recent beverage, whether it be at a bar, liquor store, or guy in a parking lot. The answer will change and will be checked based on time i check answers. As a bonus, if you can also name the brand you will gain an extra Mii (you can choose anyone you like, as long as i know what they look like or you can provide a picture). Ok, good luck, and good luck. Enjoy the coming week, and get your Men's Clubs planned now.

Please be assured that this Contest from 2007 still stands (tho it seems like it has become quite a bit easier since then!), but also that Roman Numeral J continues to provide the best up to the date information...

And so, it is my sorry news to deliver that Men's Club is no longer the institution that it was.  But instead, on each first Friday afternoon of each month we've been hosting a Commune Meet-up at 6pm CT since about 2012...

You (whomever you are) are welcome to join... Just let me know, and I'll set up a link.  It's weird times, I think for all of us just now, but we can all come together to acknowledge it, and figure it, and move on...

The Last Piece with Peanut Butter

 For almost all of my workaday life, I have been, nearly without exception, almost gonna be late. 

Almost gonna be late is a state of mild, yet steadily increasing panic that permeates every single morning before work for a person with my condition whereby you wake up feeling like it might be just a little later than you had intended to awaken and therefore may have to hurry a bit this morning, and then steadily, at each stage where you check the time you’re somehow a little bit later until you leave the house (first having to move your wife’s {who is btw blissfully still fast asleep upstairs} car into the street making you oh just that tad later) and start driving and realize that even if the streets are entirely empty due to some unrealized apocalypse and every light turns in your favor, you will only be 7 minutes late, and 7 is less than half of 15, so you can still count it as starting at 8, rather than 8:15. This all occurs only to realize upon arrival that nobody cares or pays attention at all to your comings and goings. 

For a prodigious sleepy-head, I have had some obscenely early staring times at my jobs over the years. I had to get to the library at MCC by 7am (I think my start time was actually 6:30, but the library itself opened at 7, so if I wasn’t there by then I was officially failing the public), and I think the Deli at Lake Lawn opened as well at 7am (again, I think I was supposed to get there earlier, but as long as I was there a few minutes prior would give the coffee time to brew I never got found out). Paint crew started at 6am (but had the advantage of literally waking 5 minutes before you started, blundering there, and then finding a room far from where Bob Sheets was working where you could sit on the floor and sleep for a couple hours, pretending like you were working on “the bottom of the wall”). 

Even after my rise into middle management (prior to my precipitous and predictable fall), when I was by no means punching a clock or needing to be anywhere by an absolute time*, I not infrequently grabbed the 6am Southwest flight to La Guardia or the 6am Hiawatha train to Chicago (both of which had me walking into the relative hearts of each of those cities at right around 9:30am local time). 

All of this is to say, that once in a great while (and today was one of those rare onces), I find my self awake and refreshed before my alarm is set to go off, and going through my morning steps discovering that today I might be running just a little bit ahead for a change, and might just have a bit of extra time for something (maybe a little reading, a toss with my dog, or in today’s case a {very slightly} leisurely breakfast). Today I had the time to make myself some toast and use up most of the last of the peanut butter jar thereon. (I’m delighted to discover that I’m not the first person to consider this issue

source: huffPo.com

!)

Scraping out (most of) the last of the peanut butter jar is an art and a skill that I have mastered over the years. It takes time and patience, and starts with assessing correctly that you have the appropriate amount of PB remaining in the jar: too much, and you may need to have another piece of toast (plus, you’ll have scraped for nothing!); too little and the last piece of toast (AHH!!…) with peanut butter will likely be quite disappointing or needing something else to cover over some of the gaps. 

Once you decide to take on this rewarding task, I like to start at the center bottom of the jar, and scrape out to the edges.  Don’t worry so much about getting volume on your knife at this stage, your more just trying to get enough together around the bottom circumference of the jar to get one or two small glomps^ of PB on your toast before you begin the orbital scraping process that should satisfy to fill in most of the gaps on your toast between glomps. For orbital scraping, begin at the top, and with your knife mostly vertical, scrape around the inside, where the grooves for the lid are. This should yield you a fairly good crop of filler creamy PB. Next, repeat but just below that first lip of the inside of the jar. This will likely be your most productive line of filler, so be sure to go all the way around. Continue thusly on down the jar until you have a satisfying piece of PB toast in front of you, and congrats!, you’ve (mostly) used up the peanut butter jar. 

Enjoy!!

* I am talking here start time or departure time from home in the morning, not for any other meetings or appointments throughout the day. For those, for me, time is sacrosanct and I am on time (or 3-5 minutes early for a meeting off site), every time. 

^ Glomp is the standard unit of measurement of peanut butter as recognized by the Seeger Science Ministry (SSM) with one standard issue piece if toast taking 3 to 4 glomps for full coverage. 

Not quite sure what to call it…

 

As I was finishing with the last of Walter Benjamin’s 1933 writings (the last was “Experience and Poverty”, which is about, among other things, the poverty of experience that we are/were enduring in our/his modern times), a buttered piece of raisin wheat bread from Mary’s Market and an as yet untitled Irish Coffee variation (unfortunately some bar in the Pacific Northwest has already coined another of their cocktails as Spanish Coffee, which was my first thought).  This one was made with the wonderfully sharp Empress 1908 Elderflower Rose Gin, but I imagine that any gin would sharp up your morning coffee to make for an enjoyable day of leisure.

Next week I start full-time work for the first time in some time, but today I’ll enjoy a bit of the life Ibiza… Afternoons, and coffee spoons. Maybe some T.S. Elliott...

What a Difference a Score Makes...

 It occurred to me this morning*, while I was driving around listening to A History of the World in 6 Glasses, and a reference was made to Sumerian transaction records of beer disbursement (think stone spreadsheets) in the 21st Century BCE, that we get further away each century (and each decade, and, indeed, year) from our Mirror Year (i like to say it in my head so it rhymes!) - the equidistant year on the opposite side of the very arbitrary Moment Zero - and therefore, likely, know less and less about each mirror year than we did previously.

Last weekend I had the opportunity at Gary Con to play two sessions of Gary Gygax's post-TSR role playing game, Dangerous Journeys, which is set on Ærth, an alternative historical Earth, and (in these sessions and in the primary sourcebook of the game) takes place in a version of Ancient Egypt.  As part of character generation in the game, you (can) roll for all aspects of your lot in life, as we all do as we're being rolled up - your level of wealth, parentage, personal traits and peccadillos, as well as physical and mental abilities - and that rolled lot in life affects how you bumble through the world.  The GM didn't explicitly say it, but we easily could have been setting out on our adventure in the year 2024 BCE.

I've been thinking about life in the modern world versus what life might have been like in earlier generations (and even ancient - when does ancient start by the way? - generations), and how someone from one might settle and mettle in to another...  As I started to dig in to the 21st Century BCE, I did find that there was a lot less that we seemed to know (according to our repository of all knowledge, Wikipedia) than even one century later in the 20th Century BCE.  This biasedly confirmed my original take that we will always continue to know less than we did about our mirror year (or more so our mirror century, as in any given year big things can {and do} happen to let them stand out), but I had just been considering that, due to an increase in academic inquiry and improved methodologies and overall knowledge, I would have expected instead to find some kind of equilibrium of knowledge of our mirror year.

Although the highly arbitrary mid-point was only invented around 500 CE (aka AD), I think it's not too much of a stretch to think that people living in the first few centuries of the Common Era were, while certainly aware of the goings on of their immediate ancestors, in terms of civilizational history perhaps comparatively even as to our own knowledge of our own mirror year.  Traditional Western history had the idea of a Dark Age prior to the European Renaissance, however at that same moment Arabic cultural, scientific, and philosophical civilization was preserving the ancient knowledges of earlier Ancient Greek tradition.

I think we like to think that our modern situation makes us special (exceptional, as it were), and that we are uniquely positioned to understand and judge not only our forebears, but also our less geographically-fortunate (shall we say) contemporaries.  Every age thinks of themselves as Enlightened however, and only when we have some time distance do we start to suspect that an era may not have been all that.  I don't, however, think that that interim of time is necessarily the century (or centuries) of retrospect that we might think, historically.  I wonder if it really might be closer to just 20 or 25 years or so that we can really start to intelligently reflect.  

Which means, depending on when we want to mark our start of our foolish historical moment (whether it's the 2016 election of a game show host as president; the first as tragedy, then as farce "Tea Party" elections of 2010; the launch of Twitter in 2006; or more depressingly perhaps the height of dumb cancel culture, which hopefully is in our past, but not sure how far back...), we may have quite a wait yet, or be close to the moment when we can finally get a grasp of what we've wrought...

* I've helpfully charted my core sentence in this paragraph in purple...

What is it That Must Be Said?

 I've just finished an obscure essay of Walter Benjamin's about art history, and approaches to the study of art (but also the study of literature and also history and even, somehow, botany) that may turn out to be among the most profound, and, at our current moment in history, among the most important of all of his writings.

At first glance, he seems just to be in the weeds of an argument about whether a new 'modern' interpretation of how to do art history has replaced the 'classical approach' of antiquity in the early 20th Century, but I think he is more gesturing toward his eventual theories of conceptualizing history and the great potential of the fragment, which are already in his mind, but he hasn't clearly articulated in 1932 when he's writing this essay.

"So began a train of thought that I am no longer able to pursue.  But its last link was certainly much less banal than its first..."

"..., and led on perhaps to images of animals." (is perhaps less than the conclusion for the pull quote that I was hoping for, but there it is).  This quote is actually not from the essay I was talking about, rather from the subsequent one in the collection I'm reading, "Hashish in Marseilles", but it hits on (or is at least adjacent to) what I am finding here (here in this post, and all around the whole blog generally).  That is, that when I start to write a post that is trying to get across an idea (rather than one that's just a response to something or a compilation), I begin a train of thought that turns in to a (compelling) black hole of ideas that starts to connect to and pull in whole bunches of texts and ideas that I'm reading now or have done in the distant or recent past, and the connections and rhymes and implications become bigger (and yes, less banal), and better, but begin bouncing beyond my basis from back at the beginning of the post.  And so I pull up short in all of these begun, and possibly one day done posts, which I occasionally open up, and ask myself, "what was this one going to be about again, really?"

But maybe not this time - if I just decided to say what I meant to say, instead of going back and being sure I was saying the best way I could or should - 

And so, Walter Benjamin was writing in the early days of an era of crisis, 1932 in Germany, and he was of a generation of artists (and of Artists, if you subscribe to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, which I do for the moment, having recently finished The Fourth Turning is Here, by Neil Howe) who had thought to shake up and change the world with their avant-garde art and politics and thoughts only to watch it all seem to begin to unravel as they were entering middle age and the crisis era was ramping up and threatening to destroy the whole world. 

That generation of, not just artists, but all walks of life, came of age just in time to witness (and largely participate in) the horrors of World War I, and then bask in the wonders of the Roaring Twenties, and seemed to be living through a time that would see things on the upswing and a world forever changed (in this case, cured of war) while at the same time harboring deep divisions and animosities that were being largely glossed over (rural poverty versus Flapper culture; Teetotalers getting Prohibition passed in America... versus Flapper culture {and mobster culture!}; race stuff...).

That era of the 1930s is having a moment, not just because it's the Nazis and World War II, and it's always what our stories turn to.  Rather, Neil Howe would suggest that we are in a parallel historical moment of crisis now, starting with the 2008 Great Recession (he marks that previous crisis era starting with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and through to the Great Depression, and through the conclusion of WWII).  As Benjamin, a Jew writing in 1932 Germany, he's in the midst of the crisis, but seemingly doesn't know it yet.  So too we, here in 2024, can't tell what the nature of the real disaster we are about to experience will be.

We feel like we know who some of the main characters of the coming disaster might be: Vlad Putin seems a good candidate for a villain on that side of the pond, and we have our own possible seat filler over here, oranger and dumber to be sure, but not that much less menacing.  But we don't have any idea, yet, how this one turns out over the next decade or so... whether it's another world war, like (and very much unlike) the last one that ended the last crisis cycle (for the record, Star Trek future history records World War III {or 3, as we may have progressed beyond a time when we can rely on most people to be able to read Roman Numerals...} as starting in 2026, and 2024 is among the most tumultuous years in all of Star Trek history), or perhaps this cycle will end in another American Civil War of some kind, like the one that ended the cycle prior.  Or perhaps it's something wholly new, that we haven't even considered before that results from improved AI or Quantum Computing or ____________.

But we're here for it, and if history rhyming (or repeating itself) is indeed a thing, better days are ahead (but after a big terrible thing first... sorry.) 

You have no idea the torment and torture...

 So, I saw Madame Web yesterday with my bro, against my better judgement (but well within my completionist tendencies...), and while it was mostly very much no good as expected, I had the chance to couple it with a new (to me) kaiju film on Max: Invasion of Astro-Monster.

While I'm not a massive connoisseur of kaiju films, I understand the formula (albeit almost as much from Mystery Science Theater 3000 as from seeing them on the their own).  I get that you're not meant, necessarily, to question the structural logic or motivations of characters in kaiju, but when that kaiju half of your Double Feature Challenge is the movie that rings truer, has characters with more realistic emotional lives and motivations, and more intellectually satisfying plotting, then if you are ready to embrace the camp and absurdity of your day of movie-watching, you could, potentially, be in for something of a treat... probably not, but I'll see if I can unpack it here a little bit.

 The post title here is a line from one of the more obscenely, absurdly dumb sequences in all of Madame Web, where our villain, Ceiling Guy is lying in bed (just like Brian Wilson did) with a woman who he just met, and we are meant to believe seduced a scene earlier at the opera by picking up a piece of garbage from the floor and handing it to her, then watching some of the opera.  This woman who is seduced by Ceiling Guy('s I wanna say evident sensitivity or intelligence {or possibly wealth?} because he's at an opera), turns out to be a spy who no one will miss or notice that her password is being used 24/7 by Ceiling Guy's ??Executive Assistant?? to access every camera in the city (in the world?, it's never quite clear), and our Spy Woman's susceptibility to sleeping with 'super' villains moments after meeting them is only the second dumbest thing about this whole sequence.  The worst by far is Ceiling Guy's continued use of the phrase "you have no idea..." or "if you only knew..." or such similar to imply that he has good reason for doing all the dastardly things he's doing, but really only serves to have the viewer say, "right, I don't know... are you ever going to show my or hint at some further reason?..., but no, they aren't going to.

The aliens from Planet X (Xiliens) by comparison have pretty clear (if insanely overcomplicated) motivations...  Upon revealing themselves to the human astronauts, they befriend them by sharing their deepest fear of King Ghidorah (a giant, flying, laser / lightning spitting monster), and then ask for Earth's help by loaning them Godzilla and Rodan (I'm not sure why, exactly, they wouldn't then just be harried by G & R if they succeed in chasing KG off)...

With kaiju, the camp is baked in - to be expected - and even if Madame Web wasn't made meaning to lean in to the camp, I think if you watch it the same way you might watch a kaiju film, there's something here to enjoy.  It's dumb (like, for some reason no one ever goes looking for a stolen taxi and first aid solely consists of chest compressions... just do that forever, and you can save anyone, no matter what has happened to them), but if you just go with it, and assume that they're doing all of this intentionally for comedic affect, I think it might actually be enjoyable.

My advice, if you're taking on this challenge is 1) drinks, lots of drinks; and 2) start with Invasion of Astro-Monster, and then move on to Madame Web, to sorta get you in the mood...