Ruth Rendell died on May 2. She suffered a stroke back on January 7, and though she lasted for a while, she was unable to recover. That wasn’t entirely unexpected – she was 85-years-old.
I am an aspiring Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine complete-ist and hope to own first editions in all of her books. I only have a few at the moment but hopefully I have a few more decades to finish up.
I had started a Ruth Rendell discussion for this site. She was not only one of the best mystery writers ever to grace the genre, but she understood mental illness in a way no other writer has mastered nearly as well. I am writing about some of the mentally-ill characters Rendell created, among them the woman with contamination OCD in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, the main character with borderline personality disorder in The Bridesmaid, and a host of afflicted characters in her short stories. The illnesses play an important role in her intricate but quite believable plots and it almost seems at times like Rendell wrote about mental illness in a way that could poke at my own mental ticks. The protagonist in “You Can’t Be Too Careful” suffered from some sort of personality disorder and was obsessed with safety, orderliness, cleanliness and self-assumed duty. She was constantly ruminating over locks, doors on latches, dusting books, cot beds. When I was a kid, I had a pretty serious case of echolalia that I more or less grew out of but always lurks. This short story set it off. It was the repetition of “k” and “t”, I think. I find myself saying, under my breath, book lock cot latch book lock…
I wonder if anyone else has this experience when they read this story?
At any rate, I will at some point finish and post the article. Ruth Rendell really was one of the finest writers of her generation and genre and I feel somewhat stricken to know she is gone forever and that there will be no more books. God speed, Baroness Rendell.
Central Texas is not supposed to be this cold. Seriously, I used to dream of moving to Maine and White Christmases and other ice-glazed fantasies, but I am rethinking that dream.
The Every Cradle is a Grave discussion will have to wait because I simply cannot get it together. I am emotionally unable to pull out what it is I want to say. My mother had a very bad death, one that did not have to happen in a society wherein we understand that it is unacceptable to ask an elderly woman with no higher brain function left due to a hemorrhage, a woman who was terminally ill and close to death before the hemorrhage happened, to starve to death in an irreversible coma because suicide is bad. I’m a failed suicide. There is a successful suicide in my family that haunts some of us, and haunted my mother especially in the months before her death. So yeah, this is an issue carrying a lot of recent and distant emotional baggage for me.
We are having an ashes ceremony for my mother in two weeks and I hope having a ceremonial end to the medically-sanctioned torture that my family endured earlier this year will make it easier for me to complete that discussion. Not in terms of writing – I’ve written a novel about this book. My problem is that I want to say everything at once and I need to get some emotional clarity. Look for it later this month, hopefully.
But before then I have other books I can discuss and will. Actually, I have a shocking number of books to discuss. 2014 was really a lost year in many regards.
I’ve been falling down some true crime holes lately (insomnia was killing me last week and insomnia always means finding weird crap online as I restlessly surf on my phone praying for some REM) and I stumbled across this woman’s blog. Her writing style amuses me and she discusses less-famous murder cases. The case that landed me on her site, the intensely strange story of Albert Brust (a Nazi-loving, untermensch and middle-aged virgin who became a torture killer and incorporated a dead body into a bathroom remodel), is the weakest entry on the site yet is still very interesting, so if you dislike it, keep reading. If you like my verbose style and appreciate sarcasm set to eleven, you’ll like her blog.
So I plan to plow through some discussions as I wait for my brain to open up for Sarah Perry’s opus. Let me know what you’ve been reading or any interesting blogs you’ve come across. (Oh, yeah, I plan to update my favorite sites and writers sidebars soon. I don’t think I’ve messed with it in four years and it is painfully out of date.)
ETA: I made a correction above because it looked like I was damning with faint praise the true crime site I linked to. Not the case, and thanks, reader known as ART, for e-mailing me questions because otherwise it would have gone unnoticed. Bleah.
So sorry for the silence on my end. I’ve been writing quite a bit, so much in fact that I have written myself into a corner. Every Cradle Is a Grave came into my life as I was experiencing death and the rage and depression death brings with it. I have written over 20,000 words about the book and, though I am well-known for my wordiness, that is a wholly inappropriate number of words to use to discuss a book. I am self-indulgent but luckily I still have a bit of self-awareness and now I am spending time editing so that I can present my frame of mind regarding the book without substituting my frame of mind for the book. I will have the discussion up early next week.
I will also have another “middle of the road” discussion up either tomorrow or Thursday.
I’ve been immersed in some interesting media and topics this week, one of which turned into a rabbit-hole. I follow the “Unresolved Mysteries” subreddit and a German user posted about a murder I had never heard of and as a result I have been scouring the Internet, reading crappy translations of old German news articles, finding every detail I can about it. In 1998, thirteen year old Tristan Bruebach was murdered in such a sexually specific and audacious manner that I cannot believe I had not heard of this murder before and I also cannot believe this was the sole time the murderer performed such a killing. But against all logic, it seems like that is the case. Seriously, three decades of reading and studying and I have never heard of a murder like this, and there are so many strange details about Tristan, his activities before his murder, and the way he was killed that even seasoned professional criminologists are baffled by the case.
I’ve also been listening to the Michigan band His Name Is Alive almost non-stop. I don’t know how to describe this sort of music and the band has continually evolved since the late 80s so it’s hard to pigeon-hole the effort. The only constant member of the band is Warren Defever, with different musicians and singers coming and going.
A friend of mine in college gave me a mixed tape with “Baby Fish Mouth” on it but it was the early 90s, no iTunes and precious little Internet outside of university labs, and tracking down small, indie bands was harder then. I finally got a copy of the album, Mouth by Mouth, and every song was worthwhile, which seldom ever seems to happen. The singer on this track, Karin Oliver, performed with HNIA for several years but evidently is now an account manager at a marketing firm.
“How Ghosts Affect Relationships” is from the album Livonia, released in 1990. It wasn’t until this album got uploaded to YouTube that I could access it. I don’t know if it’s rare or if it’s just that I wasn’t thorough. This is the best song on the album, I think, and it’s a little musical knife in my heart.
“How Dark Is Your Dark Side” is not the best song on Xmmer, a 2007 album, but I listen to it over and over because I love the singer, Andrea Morici. There is something sweetly hypnotic about her voice on this track. I think she may be the best vocalist to work with Defever.
So that’s where I am. Buried in hyperemotional reactions to a book about antinatalism, searching for information about a savagely murdered child, and listening to experimental rock. See you soon with a short entry about two short story collections that disappointed me sincerely.
My mother died on Saturday. I have a lot I want to say about her but I am going to save it for her birthday. I’m sort of unfocused at the moment and need some time to be able to order my memories because I want my eulogy for her to be worthy of her. She’d been ill for a long time, and in terrible pain. Her death was a relief and a mercy. Her funeral is Saturday, and I suspect I’ll be back posting regularly some time in February. Maybe sooner.
This is my favorite picture of my mother and me. She was maybe 26 when this was taken. We’re out at my grandparents’ home in a tiny Texas town called Lawn. My mother’s pictures are characterized by her wry smile and it’s definitely in evidence in this photo. Though her sickness affected her for many years, this is how I always remember her, at an age much younger than I am now. Skin clear of prednisone damage, hair full and thick, back unbowed. And that strange smile that told us all she knew things she would never tell, and they were funny, strange, interesting things, too. Finding out about my mother, especially her own work with strange and incendiary books, has been a revelation. I’ll be sharing some of those stories here soon.
Finally, something truly creepy and scary for Halloween week.
At some point during 2000, I read a book called A Twist at the End: A Novel of O. Henry and the Texas Servant Girl Murders of 1885 by Steven Saylor. I’m not entirely sure how I came to have this book because I’m not really one for historical fiction, but once I learned that the book was indeed based on real events, I became obsessed with the Servant Girl Annihilator case. As most friends I had at the time can tell you, I pretty much sent a copy of this book to anyone who showed even the slightest interest in it. I went on a “ghost tour” that took me on a walk late at night to visit the locations of some of the murders. It was on this tour that I learned about the “Moonlight Towers,” one of which stood at the end of the street where Mr. Oddbooks and I lived at the time, a nearly useless anachronism that seemed pointless to me until I learned their origin.
Much of what I am going to share here is data I have rattling around in my brain, but I will include a list of links at the end of this article for those who may want to read more about this interesting case than just what I remember.
The moniker “Servant Girl Annihilator” is actually both a flippant and misleading moniker for the person or persons behind the murders that occurred in Austin, Texas in 1884-1885. The name comes from a line William Sydney Porter, aka “O. Henry” put in a letter to a friend, describing the events in Austin in the summer of 1885. In a bitchy little comment worthy of Oscar Wilde, Porter snarked that Austin was terribly boring but the attacks from the “Servant Girl Annihilators” made things interesting at night. This moniker is misleading because men, boyfriends/common law husbands living with some of the female victims were also attacked, and because the last two women killed were not servants, but “respectable” married women.
But most of the victims were indeed women and most of them were black servants. Here is a list of the victims, as well as what was done to them. Most readers of this site are hardy people, but if you are new here, the content that follows may be a bit upsetting.
Before I begin to discuss the situation with Varg, I need to make a couple of statements, one for clarity and the other just because it always comes up and it’s tiresome. First, let me tell you how I know Varg. I met him when I was working on a project I started before 9/11 that eventually fell apart because I am sort of chaotic and was even more so back then. I consider him a friend, and I assume he considers me one, too, though we frequently butt heads. Second, despite considering Varg a friend, I don’t share all of his beliefs. I mention this because I get shade from both sides of the fence and it’s annoying, when it isn’t amusing. Some people assume I am an anti-Semite because I like Varg and that makes them angry. Interestingly, some remain angry when I explain I don’t hate Jews because they think I should revile Varg for being an anti-Semite. But then some people who agree with antisemitic ideas find out that I like Varg and that I am not an anti-Semite, and they get angry. Not long ago some dude who thinks he’s like Charles Martel because being anonymous on the Internet is evidently pretty empowering was so annoyed by me that he social media snarked me with, “Oh, you are a multicultural white genocide supporter?”
Isn’t that how journalists used to know they were on to something – when everyone was pissed off at them? That’s what I tell myself these days. So please know I don’t want to hear your opinion about my beliefs, unless you feel that freedom of speech is a bad thing and then I will totally be willing to throw down with you in comments.
Iain Banks lost his battle with gall bladder cancer today. The Wasp Factory is one of the books most frequently mentioned to me as a book I should discuss on this site and it is an odd/sick book classic, a piece of dark genius. Banks was an author who was truly sui generis and I hope when my time comes, I am able to go with the same black humor Banks showed at the end.
I felt a strange kinship with Banks because I know so few people in real life who never feel lonely. He was raised an only child in a bookish home and as a result, he grew into an adult who never needed company because he was never at loose ends with himself and he didn’t feel the aching loneliness that seems so much a part of the lives of many people. It’s a gift from the Universe to be given the sort of personality wherein one seldom if ever feels boredom or isolation from others.
Banks’ writing as Iain M. Banks informed a lot of how it is that I look at odd books. It’s deeply saddening that he is gone.
Just talking with you guys. “I think the young people enjoy it when I get down verbally, don’t you?”*
–I had a really good entry planned for today but it required a scanner and evidently our scanner is no longer a scanner. Maybe it’s a toaster now. Maybe it’s a small space heater. It is a mystery, but we do know for sure it’s not a device that can capture an image. So Mr. Oddbooks will be purchasing a new scanner this weekend and I will have a nice discussion about death photography up on Monday.
–Think Progress had a very interesting article about how one can consume good content created by horrible people. Roman Polanski and Orson Scott Card are the focus of the article but I see this question come up a lot in regards to black metal, specifically Varg Vikernes. On the other side of the coin that I explore more often is how to ethically handle really morally upsetting content that comes from people who are not bad people – like Peter Sotos’ works. I’d love to know how y’all handle such issues. I can’t see ever giving a single penny of mine to a man like Card, who opposes equal protection under law for roughly 10% of the people in this country, but this article gives a full story of what hinges on the success of the upcoming Ender’s Game movie, issues that go beyond not giving one’s money to a bigoted man.
–There will be some changes coming here on IROB. We are going to begin monetizing the site and it makes me nervous. I’ve built up a respectable body of work over here and I don’t want to taint it but, at the same time, site ads are so ubiquitous at this point that it’s hard to claim they do any harm to a site. The problems arise, I think, when bloggers begin to engage in sponsored content. That doesn’t happen much with book bloggers, unless you consider review copies a form of sponsoring. Which I don’t.
I am also going to start accepting ads from writers who are in the position of having to publicize their own books. The cost for a monthly will be super-cheap. I will be offering ad space once I have a solid track record of posting at least two book discussions a week. I don’t have extraordinary traffic on this site, but I do have a solid readership of people who often buy books as a result of my discussions. At any rate, that is coming up sometime during the summer.
If you guys notice anything amiss with the ads, probably strictly Google Adsense, please let me know. If anything we add screws up your experience on this site, we need to know.
People have mentioned tip jars and subscriptions and the like. I feel more uncomfortable with that than ads. Some people’s blogs are like magazines and worth subscribing to, but this site is me, me only and I don’t ever see having guest or co-bloggers. I’ve also grown disgusted with the antics one sees from uber-feminist-blogger-beggar Melissa McEwan, who routinely berates her readers for money so she can get a living wage from blogging, going so far as to have one of her co-mods tell a woman with five dollars left from her child support moneyto fork it over to help support Melissa, a comfortable, middle-class, childless woman with a husband who supports her. I’m a middle-class childless woman with a husband who supports me and the only time any of you should part with money because of anything I said is when I recommend a book you decide you want to buy. And though I know she is an extreme example, McEwan’s antics (and the antics of others like her who failed to make a viable business plan before making blogging their source of income) have forever tainted the tip jar for me. The fact is that magazines don’t make much money from subscriptions – they make money from ads and it’s a piss-poor business plan to expect readers to pay your wages just because you think it taints you if you take corporate money.
–I got an e-mail from a guy in Croatia who praised IROB, but also told me that when he watched the video for “Ride” by Lana Del Rey, he thought of me. I watched the video and was baffled. I asked Mr. Oddbooks what part of my online persona would make anyone think of me when they watch a video about a biker prostitute with borderline personality and a daddy-complex. He watched the video and he understood immediately what my Croatian admirer meant. Though this is clearly in the Southwest somewhere, like Arizona or Nevada, this is likely how a lot of people look at Texas. Wild landscape with lots of sand, people in fringe wearing boots with shorts, lots of beer bottles, lots of guns. I replied and asked him if he meant the landscape and rather than the girl in the video, but never heard back.
For what it’s worth, here’s the video:
As melodramatic videos go, this one ain’t bad. If I was 18, I bet I’d be all over this. Sadly, the middle-aged me mentally told the pretty, drunk girl in the middle of the desert with a bunch of bikers to take off the war bonnet, put the gun away, and sober up and that would be good step toward not feeling fucking crazy. But the American cinematic and literary experience she’s grooving on was built on the backs of pretty, drunk, fucking crazy people. Where would we be as a country without attractive people who are out of their minds. So thanks, Croatian Man, for leading me to this video. It was a hoot, of sorts.
*Though I in no way resemble Lana Del Rey’s daddy-biker girl in this video, I was told frequently in my teens that I reminded people of Jordan from Real Genius, which is the movie from which this quote originates. I’m way fatter now and talk a little bit slower but my neuroses are far more Jordan-eqsue than the languid lunacy Lana Del Rey brings to the table. But ending up with the dorky genius was a far better fate for me than wearing a white dress and screaming at bikers. Mileage, as always, varies.
This is not a political rant. This is a common sense rant.
I have noticed online some disturbing statements from unhappy Romney-ites. Once it was revealed that Australia was not really the paradise they thought it would be to escape godless Socialism, eyes fell on Texas. Let me clear up a few problems with the idea of hoards of white, disappointed folk rushing my state in the hopes of creating a new republic when Texas engages in a bloody war against the USA to secede:
1) Texas is not about to secede. I know Perry spoke of it but Perry said a lot of things (I was of the opinion he deliberately tanked his presidential chances by saying loony things – he didn’t want to be president any more than I do), and despite being Governor, he really isn’t the boss of us. David Dewhurst is the boss of us and he has higher political aspirations and won’t risk them suggesting that Texas engage in what can only end up being a giant, bloody clusterfuck. Outside of Texe Marr enclaves of utter lunacy you will not find the mass of Texan bosoms heaving for secession. We are devoted Americans, though many of us value our state as much as we value our country.
2) I do not know where the idea that Texas as a whole hates the Democratic Party came from, but a simple Google will show you that a full 40% of the state voted for Obama. National election-wise we are a Red State but in terms of popular vote we’re more a purply-magenta color. We are not your default angry-white-dude Eden.
3) If common sense fails you and you find yourself on a modern day wagon trail coming to Texas thinking we will soon be a new country and a conservative stronghold, please understand that you may want to step lightly as you barge into my home state, a place where even the housewives are armed. It’s untrue that all liberals eschew pro-2A ideals, just like it’s untrue that Texas is about to secede. We won’t take well to Romney carpet baggers rushing down here and telling us what to do.
Yeah, I know all those people bloviating online have no intentions of moving here. But of all the reactionary things said in reference to Obama winning, this one is so dumb. At least when whiners in 2004 sniveled about going to Canada when Bush won, Canada made sense to the ideals of liberal butthurt.
Seriously, how hard is a Google. If the only places you can find sources for Texas secession as real possibility are infowars and the comment sections on a variety of AM radio stations, then don’t pack the car (or babble about packing the car). If the people who are commenting that Texas is about to secede are using Confederate Flags as their user icons, mayhaps they have a far different agenda at work than simply longing for “freedom.” If you don’t bother to look up how the actual popular vote went in my state, you will miss the better opportunity to go to Oklahoma, which is a far Redder state than Texas.
In fact, may I make a suggestion? Oklahoma: A Much Better Choice for Unhappy Romney-ites!
ETA: Yes, yes, a bunch of you are sending me a Fox News graphic showing that “thousands” want to secede from various states all over the Union. Maybe even tens of thousands? All I can say to this is that 26 million people, give or take a few, live in Texas. Even 500,000 people wanting to do anything in Texas is such a meaningless number that I cannot help but lip fart at anyone who thinks that signing online petitions means anything. If half a million people in Texas want to secede, that means about 2% of the state wants out. At any given moment 2% of the state wants all sorts of damn fool things they ain’t gonna be gettin’. I imagine 2% of Texans want to legalize meth, want to make it legal to beat postal officials on sight, want to make church attendance compulsory and similar half-baked notions that are near and dear to the lunatic fringe.
But that 500,000 I mentioned is a generous number since not even 100,000 Texans have signed the online petition. One hundred thousand butthurt souls wanting a bloody war of secession equals about .3% of the state. I imagine .3% of the state want to have sex with a tree. .3% of the state want to write snake handling into the constitution. .3% of the state want to eat your dog. And not even that many people want to secede.
So go on being butthurt while the national media eggs you on the way they egged on Alec Baldwin when Bush beat Kerry. All less than .3% of you. Tell Alex Jones I said hello.
I am way late to the party on this one but being out of commission is no excuse to let it go without comment.
I noticed that out of nowhere my most popular search string was “necrophilia variations,” which is awesome, though unexpected. Supervert is one of my favorite writers. In a just world, he should always lead my search strings, but alas, we do not live in a just world. But this piqued my curiosity and I checked my referrer links and found a couple of places wherein people were posting links to my discussion of Necrophilia Variations. With the assistance of Google Translate (for both sites were in Russian – dirty.ru, indeed) I was able to piece together why Russians were talking about this short story collection.
This is why. Porn actress Stoya reads from the story, “Confessions of a Skull Mask.” It is a titillating read, for reasons you will discover if you watch the video. I must warn you, however, that this video has such low volume you will need headphones and that it is not safe for work.
But warnings aside, it is wonderful and you should watch it and listen to it. And when you are finished, go buy a copy of Necrophilia Variations, if you don’t have one already. It is a wonderful book.
by Steven Saylor. I’m not entirely sure how I came to have this book because I’m not really one for historical fiction, but once I learned that the book was indeed based on real events, I became obsessed with the Servant Girl Annihilator case. As most friends I had at the time can tell you, I pretty much sent a copy of this book to anyone who showed even the slightest interest in it. I went on a “ghost tour” that took me on a walk late at night to visit the locations of some of the murders. It was on this tour that I learned about the “Moonlight Towers,” one of which stood at the end of the street where Mr. Oddbooks and I lived at the time, a nearly useless anachronism that seemed pointless to me until I learned their origin.
, if you don’t have one already. It is a wonderful book.