More great ways to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights

Political intimidation! Sheesh.

A Thanksgiving with 49,000 empty chairs

The Times justifiably laments the loss of 14 individuals killed in recent mass shootings. The CDC provisionally puts total firearm deaths in 2021 at just under 49,000. More than half of those are likely to have been suicides. The price we pay for the right to keep and bear.

Literary rogue males

Some novels recently read, accidentally sharing a theme, from the most recommended to the least. 

Rogue Male
Geoffrey Household

Jason Bourne meets Robinson Crusoe... in the English countryside. This NYRB reissue (first published in 1939) is an exciting and well-written if at times implausible yarn, narrated by its highly capable hero, a professional game hunter and gentleman of considerable means who finds himself being pursued by foreign agents with very bad intentions. Why this predicament? As the novel opens, our hero is on a hunting trip in Central Europe, and on a whim decides to see whether he and his long gun could get within shooting range of a certain unnamed tyrant. Just curious, you know. After that, the chase is on, back across rural England, and down a rabbit hole... almost literally. 

Our hero proves himself quite capable of violence, when necessary, but by and large he shares Bourne's conscience, and a sense of fairness and generosity that gets him into trouble on more than one occasion. He considers himself to be a member of "Class X"– defined vaguely as gentlemen of any economic means who share a certain code of honor– i.e., a mensch. This is the kind of novel that is just about perfect for a cross-country plane ride.

Silverview 
John Le Carré

This was the master's last completed novel, published posthumously, and it offers little that's new for anyone who has read most of his books, as I have. There is a rogue male here too, as there usually is: a disaffected former agent who has with justification aplenty broken faith with the English intelligence services, and now may be up to no good. There is a typical cast of Le Carré characters, and enough suspense and revelations to keep your attention. But what kept me turning the pages was one final helping of a prose stylist with a voice like no other. 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami

I was a big Murakami fan some years ago, gobbling up his blend of storytelling, appealing protagonists, and quirky take on magic realism. But at some point I left him behind, until not long ago I found myself in Bell's Books wanting to buy something and standing in front of a display of Murakami's books. This one was... disappointingly colorless. Tsukuru's "colorless" life has been dominated by the emotional scars of a trauma experienced as a young adult– a trauma with a mystery at its core. The most compelling passages of the book feature Tsukuru's relationship with his swimming partner and roommate for a brief time, with intimations of homosexual attraction brought to vivid life in a fevered dream sequence (or is it just a dream?). Yet in the end, Murakami squanders the opportunity to steer the novel in a deeper (and darker) direction, and we are left with a too-tidy wrapping up of the mystery, even if Tsukuru's future is unresolved. 

The Sense of an Ending 
Julian Barnes

A short novel that to a degree warrants comparison with Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, though I can't say it comes close to the latter book's artistry. It does share the theme of Remains: an older man looks back on his life and tries to come to terms with his unreliable memories and questionable self-justifications. In its turn, this is a sub-theme of what I view as the grand theme of almost all great English novels: self-deception– from Austen to Forster to Ishiguro. Barnes comes close when the novel introduces a twisty revelation that causes both the reader's and the narrator's hearts to skip a beat– now that's great writing. But from there, Barnes rushes to an ending that seems contrived and pat at the same time. Was he under contract for 163 pages and no more? 

Arastradero

A couple of shots from Arastradero Preserve today. The sky was lovely, even without the cheesy enhancements. Most plants are still summer-dormant, with the exception of the fuzzy fruiting coyote bush... the recent chilly rains should perk things up soon. 

Gal Costa, RIP

One of the greats...

Candidates Make Final Pitches on Economy, Abortion, and Democracy

Apparently there are differences of opinion on all three... NYT.