John B. Kean and the spirit of Christmas

One of the places I visited in Ireland back in August was the Kerry Writers Museum. The county of Kerry is an amazing place: ocean views and verdant green lushness. Some people refer to it simply as "The Kingdom." One of Kerry's best known writers is John B. Keane; he has his own room at the writers' museum.
Keane wrote a collection of stories appropriately titled Irish Stories for Christmas. The first story just tickles me with the lovely spirit of Irish Catholicism. It seems a loyal housekeeper has just said goodnight to the hardworking country priest on Christmas when there's a knock at the door. It's two brothers who say their father is dying, and the priest must come immediately to hear the old man's confession. Grudgingly, the housekeeper wakes the priest, who goes out into the snowy night and hears the old man's sins. He returns and is back in bed when the housekeeper hears another knock. The brothers are back: Their Da forgot a sin; the priest needs to come back. And it's not just any sin, it's a serious sin -- fornication!
The housekeeper decides she cares more for the priest's rest than the old man going to hell. So she says to the brothers:

"Didn't I tell ye there was no fear of him," she drew herself upwards and re-folded her arms, "for don't it say in the Catechism that hell is closed for the twelve days of Christmas and anyone who dies during that period goes direct to heaven."
The brothers exchanged dubious glances.
"Tis there in black and white," the housekeeper assured them.
The brothers turned their backs on her and consulted in whispers. After several moments they faced her secondly.
"You're sure?" the smaller asked.
"Why would I say it if it was a lie?" she countered.

The story is titled "Twelve Days of Grace." PS The old man lives.
Merry Christmas!

Books and Music

I often get tempted to blog about music and movies, but then I remind myself that what little focus this blog has is about books, and I should stick to that. So with that disclaimer out of the way ...
The NYT had authors blog about music every so often, and this entry by Joshua Ferris caught my eye -- Joshua Ferris, author of the brilliant office novel Then We Came to the End.
Ferris likes Neutral Milk Hotel. I like Neutral Milk Hotel! (And you've maybe never heard of Neutral Milk Hotel.) They were a lovely '90s band, indie and somewhat experimental. Here's a very hazy YouTube video of lead singer Jeff Mangum singing my favorite NMH song "Naomi."

Except Alex from J-school still has my copy of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Why don't you send that back to me, Alex? And send me my Glyn Styler live album back while your at it.
OK, music entry over. Read Joshua Ferris' whole playlist here. With reading suggestions.
(And I'm not kidding about those CDs, Alex!)

Round Up of Reading

We were talking at our book group the other night about how nothing we've been reading lately has really grabbed us -- as if there's some sort of malaise or boring spirit hanging out for the last few weeks. So here's a grab bag of what I hope will lead me out of the wilderness.

• Our next pick is White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. I really liked her more recent novel On Beauty, a comic but poignant novel about two families striving for success in Ivy League academia. So I have high hopes for her debut novel about families in multicultural contemporary London.
• I read the introduction to New Stories from the South: 2007 -- The Year's Best, edited by Edward P. Jones, who wrote the remarkable novel The Known World. As a native Louisianian living in Florida, I like to think there's still some special connection between the South and literature. My fear is the connection is tenuous and loosening; perhaps this collection will renew my hope.
  
• I picked up an annotated edition of Spoon River Anthology. The introduction is excellent, but the notes tend toward the mundane, i.e. "This poem is based on Joe B. Blow, who Master's knew when he lived in ..." . I hate reading literature as secret code to the author's biography, matching up characters to people the author knew. That's got to be the most mundane, trivial way to read literature.
  
• For Christmas, I want a copy of the photography book Atchafalaya. I grew up on the lower Atchafalaya, which we called the Bayou Teche (pronounced Tesh). Hear that, Santa?
  

What makes for a good audio book

A good audio book makes commuting significantly more pleasant. Before my trip to Ireland, I listened to the dark but funny Angela's Ashes, read by author Frank McCourt, and got a big kick out of it. Next I selected Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. This is a sort of environmental social history, looking at how ancient and modern societies manage their limited resources and either flourish or self-destruct. But the narrator was kind of stuffy, and had this kind of Is-it-New-England-or-British-or-what? accent that made me sleepy. So I gave up on that.
Now I have the marvelous Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is the master of updating ancient myth to contemporary times (see his comic book series Sandman). In Anansi Boys, we meet the two sons of the ancient god of storytelling, Anansi. There's Spider, who inherited his father's godlike powers, and then there's Fat Charlie, who didn't. Fat Charlie grows up thinking he's just an ordinary guy, until his father dies and he meets his mystical brother, who's trying to steal Fat Charlie's girlfriend. Adventure and hijinks ensue! I read that Gaiman called his book a "magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and that seems about right.
And the audiobook is fabulous. Narrator Lenny Henry can do it all: men and women, young and old, mortal and immortal. And he really savors the language, he sounds like he's having as much fun reading it as I'm having listening.

A Good Newspaper Column on Baseball

The best written newspaper opinion columns are fine things to read -- compact, persuasive, poetic. Check out this column written by Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post about The Mitchell Report, a damning report on baseball's steroids problem that was released this week. It starts:

Now, Roger Clemens joins Barry Bonds in baseball's version of hell. It's a slow burn that lasts a lifetime, then, after death, lingers as long as the game is played and tongues can wag. In baseball, a man's triumphs and his sins are immortal. The pursuit of one often leads to the other. And those misdeeds are seldom as dark as their endless punishment.

Read the whole thing here.