Something will happen, you'll see...
Adam's Notes for March 26, 2024
What I’ve been reading lately…
Something Will Happen, You'll See by Christos Ikonomou tr. by Karen Emmerich (Archipelago, 2010. 250 pages). “If poor people do things like that to other poor people what on earth are rich people supposed to do to us.” A book of short stories set during the Greek financial crisis. Ken Loach kitchen sink stuff. Each story ends with what I think of as a moral, but it’s not, it’s more like a heightened passage where the prose is just a little bit more stylistic and goes over the theme of the story. This is from The Tin Soldier:
In a thousand years, I hear him say. In a thousand years if the world still exists maybe the things that are happening now will have become fairytales. And parents will tell their children stories about strange people who once lived and died for a handful of cash and the children will listen with their mouths hanging open and all these things will seem magical and unreal. In a thousand years. Who knows. Maybe the workers and the poor people of today will be the tin soldiers of the next millennium. Or the dragons and witches. If the world still exists. And if people still tell fairytales. Who knows.
The story “And a Kinder Egg for the Kid” broke me. It’s about a father who’s unable to feed his kid on Good Friday. He thinks maybe he’ll be able to bum fifty euros off his adult daughter, but she doesn’t show up on the ferry. Anything about kids going hungry always makes me sad, and then angry. And to think how much worse it is in Gaza. Christ. Ikonomou writes on the personal level, but you can’t help but think about Angela Merkel and the IMF and all the people that fucked Greece over for the last decade or so.
Nightmare Town: Stories by Dashiell Hammett (Black Lizard, 2000. 396 pages). Still working my way through this one. My favourite so far is “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams.” It’s more of a western than a typical Hammett mystery. It’s got great action, and then the revelation at the end calls everything into question and lends it all a moral ambiguity. I think Raymond Chandler is the better writer of hardboiled short stories, but these are good. “House Dick” is a Continental Op story about a triple murder at a hotel and reads like a Dick Tracy comic. “Nightmare Town” has a really cool premise (a whole town built on bootlegging about to go up in flames so they can collect the insurance money). “Night Shots” is another Continental Op joint, sort of a locked room mystery.
Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant (NYRB Classics, 2009. 177 pages). I have a rule to disregard any sentences written by Frenchmen that use the word ‘coquette.’ It’s all just horny nonsense. I don’t know, I really like Maupassant’s short stories but this novel didn’t work for me.
Kenneyism: Jason Kenney's Pursuit of Power by Jeremy Appel. (Dundurn Press, 2024. 312 pages). Appel expertly demonstrates how Kenney (former federal cabinet minister under Stephen Harper and then Conservative premier of Alberta) was able to rise to power by exploiting the contradictions within the conservative movement, and then how those same contradictions tore his electoral coalition apart during the convoy crisis. Actually it’s kind of funny to think that the truckers were unable to hurt the already unpopular Trudeau and that their actual success was in ending the careers of both Kenney and federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. Worth checking out even if you aren’t an Albertan because Appel has a great read on the various factions of the conservative movement throughout North America.
Old Moon Quarterly, Volume 6 (Old Moon Publishing, 2024. 96 pages, and available now in paperback and ebook). My story "Diary of the Wolf" is in here and I think it's the best I've had published so far. It's about werewolfery and it's set in Samuel Pepys' London and written in the style of his diary. But that said, there's a lot of other great stuff in here, too. One of the things I like about submitting short stories for publication is seeing who you get published alongside. Dariel Quiogue's "The Marchers in the Fog" and R.L. Summerling's "Corpse Wax" are both a lot of fun, but I think my favourite story was Matt Holder's "Towards a Justice." What I like about Holder's writing––here and elsewhere––is that he's really able to evoke a medieval mind, and then in the course of the story force it to confront something totally alien to its experience.
I gotta figure out how to do Bookshop affiliate links, see if I can get a couple of bucks from this once in a while.
Pepys Show: March 1661
Pepys starts the month seeing ““The Bondman” acted; an excellent play and well done. But above all that ever I saw, Betterton do the Bond man the best.” Yeah that’s what I said about Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Heyooo. Betterton is his favourite actor at this point. The Bondman is about the defence of Syracuse against Carthage, and someone wrote pithily that the play was a "modest success...in untying the purse strings of (the playwright’s patron) Philip Herbert.”
On the 8th, Pepys is honoured with an invitation to dinner at the Tower with the Duchess of Albemarle, “who is ever a plain homely dowdy,” and everyone seems to get very drunk.
Rumours about the king’s marriage are still swirling, and Pepys himself thinks something is up (March 9).
Most of March involves Pepys involved with paying off the fleet’s officers and seamen (boooring). The coronation of Charles II is still a month away, but now Pepys observes that there are scaffolds going up all over London in preparation. It’s going to be a big expense for Pepys, luckily for him, the paying off of the fleet means he’ll be paid for his journey overseas to fetch the king last year, and he does better off it than expected, “and blessed be God! they have cast me at midshipman’s pay, which do make my heart very glad.” (March 12).
He attends a lot of church, it being lent, and doesn’t eat anything interesting, again because of lent. Although curiously he does allow himself bacon with his coleworts, so maybe not as strict a lent as he feared last month. And moreover, he attends something like nine plays, seeing The Bondman at least three times this month alone (he suggests he’s seen it more than that). The most interesting one he sees is maybe “All’s Lost by Lust,” which is so poorly done, “with so much disorder, among others, that in the musique-room the boy that was to sing a song, not singing it right, his master fell about his ears and beat him so, that it put the whole house in an uprore.” A real farce, but remember, plays have only just returned after the puritan attitudes of Cromwell’s regime saw them banned.
On the 25 on the way back from his father’s, Pepys finds a boy with a ‘lanthorn’ (lantern) picking rags by the road, and hires him to light his way home. They discuss the business of rag picking and Pepys “had great discourse with him how he could get sometimes three or four bushells of rags in a day, and got 3d. a bushell for them, and many other discourses, what and how many ways there are for poor children to get their livings honestly.” It’s one of those nice little bits in the diary where you see Pepys being genuinely curious about the world around him.
Links
The real list of best American novels.
The New Edge Sword and Sorcery backerkit kickstarter was a massive success, and I can’t wait to see where they go from here. Looking forward to Molly Tanzer’s take on Jirel of Joiry in particular.
#Heistwatch: I missed this: police probe possible link between seized Quebec gold and the Toronto airport gold heist. Largest American art heist still unsolved, decades later. “Ultra-specialized gang” pulls off art heist in Italy (more). The hockey bobblehead heist had me laughing and reimagining Killing Them Softly. New indigenous heist movie. This one’s pretty wild: a social engineering scam used against a tribal casino in Michigan. A caller posing as a high-ranking tribal official convinced a casino supervisor to pull $700,000 from the casino, buy a burner phone at a Wal-Mart, and hand the money over at a nearby gas station parking lot. The supervisor initially took the fall for the crime and was in jail for two months before being released. Road collapse in Athens reveals decades old heist tunnel.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! My name is Adam, this is Adam’s Notes, and you can find me online at:
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Pepys had a good month