The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Just in time for the demise of Oprah’s Book Club, author Robert James Waller has penned A Thousand Country Roads, a sequel-of-sorts to his blockbuster The Bridges of Madison County.
(As a still-unpublished writer, I am occasionally tortured by the thought that the closest I will ever come to literary success will be the fact that I attended college twenty miles away from where Waller lived, while he was writing Bridges….)
Spring in Buffalo: temperatures in the 70s this week have inspired the flowering trees in the region to blossom — just in time for this weekend’s 40 degree forecasted highs. (Oh well, at least we’ll still be able to laugh at the rest of the country in July when everyone else is in the high 90s and we’re still only in the 80s. ‘Tis small consolation, but….)
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
“Forest”, by Alan Lee.
Alan Lee is one of the foremost fantasy artists of today. His most famous works are the paintings he did for the 60th Anniversary Edition of The Lord of the Rings. Lee’s work formed the basis of some of the visual stylings used by director Peter Jackson in the current LOTR film trilogy. Lee has also done a lot of fine work that is not related to Tolkien; this is one example.
(Click on the picture for a biography of Lee, courtesy Terri Windling’s Endicott Studio.)
An in-depth review of John Williams’s score to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones has appeared on Filmtracks, one of the better film music sites (and one of the oldest). They give the review high marks, although they do say that it isn’t quite as good as Williams’s scores for the original trilogy, which are now classics of film scoring. Read the review here.
I don’t often agree with Jeff Simon, media critic with The Buffalo News, but in his regular Tuesday column this week he pretty much nailed the impending closing of the Oprah Book Club on the head:
A real book lover, that woman, don’t you think?
No? Well, you’re not alone.
Read the rest of Simon’s comments here.
Finished two books this weekend.
First was The Queen’s Man: A Medieval Mystery by Sharon Kay Penman. I wanted to like this one more than I did. Penman is a noted writer of historical fiction, most (if not all) of which is set in the late Middle Ages during the time of the Plantagenets in England. Most of her books are quite long, which makes The Queen’s Man something of a departure: it is actually quite brief, being a murder mystery set in and around London. Our hero, Justin de Quincy, witnesses the murder of a silversmith who just happens to be carrying a letter to the Queen (Eleanor of Aquitaine) about the whereabouts of King Richard, who has gone missing whilst on Crusade. Justin delivers the letter to the Queen, and she presses him into her service, charging him with identifying the silversmith’s murderer and learning if he was killed for the contents of the letter.
This is an interesting set-up, and one expects a book filled with court politics and intrigue where people are never what they seem, and where the murder of a silversmith is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. We get some of that, but for the most part the book is more pedestrian. It is as if Penman couldn’t quite decide which direction in which to go: was she telling that story of intrigue within House Plantagenet, or was she merely telling a traditional Agatha Christie-style murder mystery that happened to be set in medieval times? The book pulls in both directions, even at the end when the murderers and their motives are revealed. A resolution to a mystery like this should satisfy, and this one doesn’t. Making matters slightly worse is that some of the intrigues uncovered are left unresolved, making clear that the book is intended to be the first in a series of Justin de Quincy’s adventures (and, in fact, one sequel is already out: Cruel As The Grave).
Other plot threads are present for no apparent reason at all: at one point Justin acquires a stray dog as a companion, but the dog doesn’t figure in the story at all, despite the pages Penman spends describing the episode. The silversmith’s family, full of intrigues of its own, is delved into early in the novel but then left behind completely. And then there are certain aspects of the book that ring totally false: Penman is careful to use terms that were the vernacular of the time: phrases like “for certes” and words like “gaol” (instead of “jail”), but then she does things like have one character exclaim “That will be the day!” Maybe they really did use that phrase eight hundred years ago, but once a saying is used as a title for a Buddy Holly song, it probably shouldn’t be employed in a historical novel. Also, I found it hard to believe that a baseborn commoner like Justin de Quincy could so easily gain audience with the Queen of England as he does early in the book. (I could be quite wrong on that point, however.) Reading The Queen’s Man gave me a disjointed feeling; Penman’s characters are well-drawn (especially Luke de Marston, an earthy undersheriff), but the details of the plot never come together into a cohesive whole.
The other book finished this week is Michael Moore’s Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American. Moore, an author and filmmaker best known for the documentary Roger and Me, presents here a hodge-podge of angry liberalism. I expect that one’s enjoyment of this will be largely dependent on the degree of sympathy to his viewpoints. I found it entertaining, although my main impression was in how odd it is to read political humor from six years ago. This was pre-Monica Lewinsky America, when Newt Gingrich was still a dominant figure in American politics, when George W. Bush was only a freshman governor less than halfway into his first term of office, and when Oklahoma City was still a fresh wound. There is even a chapter on the OJ Simpson trial, which had ended less than a year before the book came out. I did find a lot in Moore’s book to agree with, but as per my avoidance-of-politics policy for this site, I will leave it at that.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Kleinhan’s Music Hall, Buffalo, NY
Kleinhans Music Hall is the home of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Kleinhans is considered one of the finest concert halls in the country, with remarkable acoustics. The reflecting pool seen here was not present for many years, but was recently restored. The main concert hall is the larger section of the building, the lefthand portion of this picture; the smaller section to the right is the Mary Seaton Room where chamber music concerts are held. The current Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic is JoAnn Faletta; previous Music Directors include Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Semyon Bychkov.
(The picture links to an organization dedicated to beautifying the Buffalo neighborhood in which Kleinhans resides.)
Poetical Excursion #1:
“Blow, Bugle, Blow”
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
(How perfectly Tennyson uses alliterative effects and rhyming to suggest the echoing of a bugle call. More than that, his language implies things passing into memory — repetitions of the word “dying”, reference to “long light” which suggests sunset, and elegant phrasing implying distance: “farther going”, “faintly blowing”. The effect is masterful. This is a poem that begs to be read aloud. If pressed to name a favorite poet, I will generally name either Whitman or Tennyson — depending on which I’ve read more recently.)