‘Art has been a blessing and a lifeline for so many.’
It certainly has been, for me.
The above title comes from an article by Caroline Campbell in the December 2020 issue of Apollo: The International Art Magazine. 
Campbell continues:
It reminds us of our humanity, and links us to others. In it, we can resilience and comfort.
She then observes:
The art of the past, however, has a task that seems particularly salient at this moment: to remind us that creativity endures in hard times, and that crises and pandemics are nothing new. Nor do they last forever, or entirely define the life and experience of those who live through them.
This is the first time I’ve seen an Apollo’s Awards Issue. It proves to be an especially enriching trove. A few of the highlights:
Toyin Ojih Odutola, selected as artist of the year.
I’d never heard of this Nigeria-born, America-raised painter. I definitely like her work.
The Firm
The Missionary
For Museum Opening of the Year: The Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Nigeria
And the British Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Obviously I can’t wait to see this, ardent Anglophile that I am!
In other venues, notable acquisitions:
Marie Antoinette in a Park, by Elisabeth Louise Vigee Lebrun, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum
Palm Sunday by Elisabeth Sonrel, acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Nice work by the women, I think. It puts me in mind of a book I read recently, entitled Eighteenth Century Women Artists: Their, Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs. The author is Caroline Chapman. If this sounds fascinating – well, it is, and then some.
Several of these women were familiar to me: Elisabeth Louise Vigee Lebrun (whose self-portrait graces the cover), Angelica Kaufmann, Rosalba Carriera. But others were new, and I was happy to get to know them.
Summer, by Rosalba Carriera. This artist, who worked mainly in pastels, was in her day much in demand as a portraitist.
Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine forges ahead into the Digital Age
For years now, the arrival of the quarterly publication Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine has been cause for rejoicing. Loaded with astute criticism, numerous reading recommendations (with helpfully assigned letter grades), and author news and information, this splendid periodical is a must read for fanatical crime fiction fans like Yours Truly.
The Editor/Publisher of Deadly Pleasures is Mr. George A. Easter. In this effort he is assisted by Associate Editor Larry Gandle and a number of knowledgeable and perceptive contributors.
In the Winter 2019 issue, Mr. Easter made known his intention to transform Deadly Pleasures to a digital only entity. When I first read this announcement, I admit that my heart sank. I prefer my newspapers and magazines to be in hard copy. But Mr. Easter has good reasons for making this switch. He gives those reasons in a special editorial, where he also acknowledges that for some readers, this will be not be a welcome change.
He offered to send me the PDF version of this issue of the magazine. I admit I was deeply impressed. My doubts pretty much evaporated.
And now is the moment to say that this issue of Deadly Pleasures, in any format, is a real triumph. To begin with, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Bouchercon Mystery Convention. To mark the occasion, George Easter was asked to come up with two booklists. One is entitled “Most Influential Novels of the Bouchercon Era,” and the other is “Great Reads from the Bouchercon Era, 1969-2019.” Mr. Easter is soliciting input from readers on both lists, but for myself, I can’t think how either one could be improved.
The second one, especially, is so full of excellent titles that I wanted to drop everything else and just read my way through it. This, despite the fact that I’ve already read several: The Laughing Policeman by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker, Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman, Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters, The Dead of Jericho by Colin Dexter, and so on. These are all great inclusions, and there are many, many more.
But wait! In addition to these, there are Best of 2018 lists, starting with George Easter’s own selections. I particularly loved this list because – well, the fact is I often like the same books that George likes, to wit: The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan, Snap by Belinda Bauer, The Fox by the venerable Frederick Forsyth, and three of my absolute favorite titles from last year: Broken Ground by Val McDermid, The Bomb Maker by Thomas Perry, and November Road by Lou Berney.
This issue is fairly bursting with ‘Best of 2018’ lists. Three by distinguished mystery fiction experts Oline Codgill, Otto Penzler, and Marilyn Stasio, followed by two pages of lists from various publications and websites.
There’s more… But let’s stop there and let me now guide you directly to this cornucopia of crime fiction. George Easter is most eager for folks to subscribe to the digital version of Deadly Pleasures. Toward that end, he is graciously allowing me to post the link to the PDF of this Winter 2019 issue of the magazine. Here it is:
Click to access Deadly%20Pleasures%20Mystery%20Magazine%20-%20Winter%202019%20-%20Issue%2085.pdf
‘Transcendence in Ordinary Domestic Life’ – and a transcendentally beautiful essay
The above painting by Pieter de Hooch is variously titled “A Mother Delousing Her Child’s Hair” or, more succinctly and less specifically, “A Mother’s Duty.” Made some time between 1658 and 1660, it is currently housed in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.
Of the artist, Willard Spiegelman tells us this:
About De Hooch we know little. Born in Rotterdam to a bricklayer and a midwife, he trained (perhaps) in Haarlem, and moved to Delft in 1652, where Vermeer also lived. It’s unclear if they had dealings. In 1661 De Hooch went to Amsterdam. He died impoverished, in a madhouse.
Spiegelman has more to say about the painting itself, which he calls ” a northern, secular version of a traditional Madonna and Child.”
In the course of this eloquent explication, Spiegelman draws a subtle difference between the art of de Hooch and that of Vermeer:
We do not find in de Hooch what we most prize in Vermeer: a mysterious sense of human inwardness, an artist’s interest in the psychological depth of his characters, either alone or in small groups.
Reading this sentence, I felt a light turn on in my mind. So that is it, that is the secret – or at least, part of it – of Vermeer’s uncanny hold on those of us who are transfixed by his art. But Spegelman does not allow us to get sidetracked by Vermeer. The subject of this jewel-like essay is the many virtues of “A Mother’s Duty.”
Spiegelman refers to the dog at the left as an element in the picture that “…increases domestic charm.” In art, the dog is a symbol of fidelity and loyalty. Two of my favorite examples of this usage are the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck and St. Augustine in His Study by Vittore Carpaccio:
(I highly recommend Jan Morris’s delightful little volume, Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation.) 
(Willard Spiegelman’s essay appeared in the August 19 – 20 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The link provided in the previous sentence may not lead you to the full text. If that happens, the article can be accessed via the ProQuest database. Please see this post for instructions on how to do this through the Howard County Library’s website. Scroll down to the bottom to view those instructions.)
I am deeply grateful for the weekly Review section of the Wall Street Journal, in which literature and the arts have unquestioned pride of place.
Say it isn’t so, David Mamet!
A piece appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal the title of which was sufficient to make me sit up and take notice:
“Charles Dickens Makes Me Want to Throw Up.”
David Mamet
Say it isn’t so, renowned playwright and screenwriter David Mamet! (Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, Wag the Dog, and much more besides.) But, alas, Mamet surely does suffer from a serious Dickens aversion, to wit:
Dickens’s characters are cardboard cutouts, even in their names: Inspector Bucket, the Brothers Cheeryble, Jerry Cruncher. They are mechanicals. His prose is turgid and, less forgivable, tortured. Here’s his rendition, in “Dombey and Son,” of a sea-captain’s dialect: “It’s an almighty element. There’s wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling.”
Mamet sums up: “What a load of bosh.” He adds that in his view, the public’s love for the works of Dickens is “sententious and perhaps even self-congratulatory.”
Well, that’s me, congratulating myself all over the place. Knowing I’m not alone eases the pain, though.
Here’s how Bleak House begins:
CHAPTER I
In Chancery
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of
the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn
Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black
drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown
snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;
splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one
another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing
their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other
foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke
(if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and
meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers
of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping
into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales
of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient
Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog
in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,
down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the
bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog
all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the
misty clouds.Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as
the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman
and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their
time–as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling
look.The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the
muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old
corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in
his High Court of Chancery.
Turgid? Seems more like magic, to me.
When I retired in 2007, one of my short term goals was to read Bleak House. I regret that I have yet to accomplish this. In fact, the only Dickens novel I’ve read in recent years is The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was, I have to admit, a bit of a struggle, though periodically enlivened by sprightly passages like this one, in which the denizens of a pantry are brought vividly to life:
Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. The pickles, in a uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre drab continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of that noble family. The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament, and as wearing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine caligraphy, like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson, Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe. Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of plum-cake, and various slender ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed.
Charles Dickens 1812-1870
Mamet gives grudging approval to A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. As for me, the experience of reading David Copperfield – several decades ago, admittedly – was nothing less than life changing. It is a towering achievement in world creation, and will always will be one of my favorite works of art.
Mamet far prefers Anthony Trollope to Dickens. I too am a Trollope fan. Many years ago I read Barchester Towers and was so vastly entertained that I resolved to read The Barsetshire Chronicles in its entirety. (Of the six novels that comprise the series, I’ve read the three starred below.)
*
* 
*
Again, this was many years ago. I recall Barchester Towers being a bravura performance in novel writing, in equal part hilarious and outrageous, while Doctor Thorne was an exceptionally poignant love story. (For an excellent appreciation of Anthony Trollope, read Adam Gopnik’s “Trollope Trending” from the May 4 2015 issue of the New Yorker.)
Mamet also offers words of praise, albeit somewhat grudgingly, to several other favorites of mine: George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon 1835-1915
George Eliot 1819-1880
Anthony Trollope 1815-1882
Wilkie Collins 1824-1889
(In my review of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, I make reference to both The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.)
Ah well – enough. Everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion in these matters – although I do have to consciously remind myself of that truism from time to time…
The Wall Street Journal keeps most of its content behind a pay wall. There is another way to access that content, though, and it’s through the public library database called ProQuest. Allow me to walk you through the process:
First, get on the library’s site: hclibrary.org. Next, scroll down until you see the words “Stream. Download. Learn.” They’re in a blue rectangle above the picture of a lady gardening. Click on that.
Scroll down to the three green circles. the one in the middle is the one you want. It contains an arrow pointing down, with three terms underneath it. The third is “e-newspapers.” Click on that. Scroll down to the ‘Wall Street Journal 1986-present.’ You’ll then be required to authenticate yourself with your bar code and pin number.
Voila – you’re in. I strongly advise that you use the ‘advanced search’ option located directly beneath the search box. Type ‘Mamet’ in the top box and select ‘author ‘(au). In the box below, your need only type in ‘Charles Dickens’ and select ‘title’ (ti) in the box to the right. The article should appear directly.
This is the set-up at Howard County Public Library. Other library systems probably offer similar facilities for online research.
More praise for The Shepherd’s Life, courtesy of a letter to the Washington Post
Kudos to Ann Massey for her letter which appeared in this past Saturday’s Washington Post. It’s entitled “Add this to your reading list;” in it, she sings the praises of The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks. 
I’ve done likewise in this space, on several occasions.
Life Changing Magic department (with apologies to Marie Kondo)
Sometimes it pays to take a deep breath and attack an unruly pile of papers. I did this the other day, and while the vast majority of items ended up in recycling, a few gems did rise to the surface.
First find: this piece from the Sunday New York Times Magazine dated August 20 2015 on the rise of Europa Editions. Originating in Italy, this publishing enterprise puts out books with a distinctive look and feel; their list features lesser known international authors that are worthy of the attention of discerning readers.
Europa has scored a coup with Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan novels. I’m waiting for my reserve on My Brilliant Friend, the first book in the series. I’m currently number sixteen out of sixty-eight names on the list. 
I have read, and do recommend, the Jane Gardam titles, Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat (see above). These novels seem to me quintessentially English; moreover,Gardam’s a unique and mercurial prose style had me hooked from the get-go.
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Second find: Laura Miller on Don Winslow’s The Cartel. This piece, which appeared in The New Yorker last summer, is in my view the high water mark of the reviewer’s art. It’s incisive, beautifully written, and bolstered by the author’s deep knowledge of crime fiction. (I’ve long enjoyed her writing in Salon.com’s book sections.) And the novel? Well, she makes you want to read it – that is, if you don’t scare too easily. This I have not yet done (either read or scare). I have read Winslow’s Savages, though. ‘Twas a memorable experience! Like James Ellroy, Winslow can be rough and uncompromising; his prose is less mannered than Ellroy’s.
I liked this observation by Laura Miller:
Most crime novelists, especially those reaching for a momentous effect, are obliged to turbocharge their villains. The perpetrator of the locked-room mystery is supernaturally ingenious, the serial killer far more baroquely sadistic than his real-life counterparts, the Mob boss too comprehensively powerful to be believed.
She goes on to say that “Mexico’s criminal cartels have never presented such a problem to Don Winslow, who has written two extensively researched sagas about the war on drugs: “The Power of the Dog,” in 2006, and now “The Cartel” (Knopf).” 
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Third find: “Easy Writers” by Arthur Krystal, an article featured in a May 2012 issue of The New Yorker. (What can I say – this was a very deep pile, deep and sprawling.) Here we have yet another foray into the (seemingly endless) controversy over whether readers of genre fiction, and in particular of crime fiction, are getting any “literary” nourishment or are merely slumming. Krystal leaps fearlessly into the subject matter with both feet and obviously has great fun doing so. That enjoyment is liberally communicated to the reader. (The article is subtitled “Guilty pleasures without guilt.”)
Here’s how Krystal starts out:
When Matthew Arnold keeled over, in April, 1888, while hurrying to catch the Liverpool tram, Walt Whitman managed to contain his grief. “He will not be missed,” Whitman told a friend. Arnold reaffirmed all that was “rich, hefted, lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis.” He was, in short, “one of the dudes of literature.” Whitman probably figured that his own gnarly hirsuteness would save him from becoming a dude. He was wrong, and therein lies a lesson for all hardworking scribblers: stick around long enough, develop a cult following, gain the approval of one or two literary dudes (in Whitman’s case: Henry James, Ezra Pound, and F. O. Matthiessen), and you, too, can become respectable.
This insouciant tone prevails throughout the piece and bestows great pleasure on the reader – or, it did on this reader, at any rate.
Here are some of the works and authors that receive mention in “Easy Writers:”
WH Auden
Philip K Dick
Henry James
PD James
Ross MacDonald
Elmore Leonard
Edmund Wilson
Raymond Chandler
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Meanwhile, as I await my reserve on Marie Kondo’s book, 
I’m off to attack yet another pile. (Believe me, around here there is no shortage of them.)
Book reviews and book reviewers
This past Sunday, Ron Charles of the Washington Post enumerated the books he’s looking forward to reading in the coming year. The column was squeezed into a tiny space. I almost missed it, and in case you actually did miss it, click here.
Ron Charles, Michael Dirda, and Jonathan Yardley, all of the Washington Post, are the most wonderful and perceptive book reviewers. Together these three have continually promoted and celebrated the reading life on behalf of those of us who live in the greater Washington area. Just last month, Jonathan Yardley announced his impending retirement. Oh, no! One hopes that he’ll still grace the pages of Book World from time to time and share his literary knowledge and boundless enthusiasm with us.
As a gift to us on the occasion of his farewell, Mr. Yardley composed a list of titles that have become, over the years, his personal favorites. Like a little kid who does well on a test, I was delighted to find that out of the fifteen fiction titles on his list, I’d read eleven!
From 2003 to 2010, Jonathan Yardley wrote a column called Second Reading, which he describes as “an occasional series in which the Post’s book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.” One of my favorites from among these essays is entitled “Six Gifted Englishwomen.”
Mr. Yardley’s Second Reading pieces have been collected in a book by the same name.
Jonathan Yardley, at ease – at last!
Best Books of 2013: more lists
First: a bit of backtracking with regard to the Washington Post. In a previous post, I expressed dismay at the presence of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs on their list of the year’s ten best books. On the other hand, Maureen Corrigan, the Post’s perceptive and eloquent crime fiction specialist, did select Louise Penny’s luminous novel How the Light Gets In for inclusion on that list, thereby, in my humble and extremely biased opinion, partially redeeming it.
And yet, I must again draw attention to another bit of end-of-the-year strangeness on the part of the Post. Their venerable critic Jonathan Yardley named his ten favorites for 2013 and managed not to include a single fiction title! Jonathan, you need to get out more. And what you really need in your reading life is some crime fiction. For years now I’ve been saying that’s where the great writing and terrific storytelling are currently to be found. This year has given me no reason to revise that opinion; if anything, it’s made me more firm in that view. Out of my own list of forty-six favorite titles for 2013, twenty-nine fall under the rubric of mystery/suspense.
At any rate – here are yet more lists:
From the Wall Street Journal: Best nonfiction, Best fiction (Yes I know – There’s The Woman Upstairs again!).
From The New Republic.
NPR tried a somewhat different approach to list making this year.
From The New Yorker. In Part One and Part Two, the editors asked their contributors to name their favorite reading of 2013.
Like The New Yorker, The Guardian asked a variety of writers and critics to name their favorites for 2013.
Library Journal staff named their Top Ten, and More.
Publishers Weekly made their selections, as did Kirkus Reviews. This link will take you to Kirkus’s choices for Best Fiction; in a column on the left, you’ll see links to other categories.
Finally – and I mention this with all due modesty, lowering my gaze, half closing my eyes, etc. – I’ve been “pinned” on Pinterest. I don’t really understand how that works, but I’m grateful anyway (I believe Yvette of In So Many Words is the responsible party!) and, along with innumerable worthy others, I’ve been aggregated – Thanks, Largehearted Boy!
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Next: best mysteries and crime fiction; stay tuned!
Working my way back to you, Books to the Ceiling!
I must apologize for my prolonged silence, occasioned by travels out West and various matters that needed to be attended to here at home. While I’m working my way back to writing – so much harder than I ever though it would be! – I thought I’d point you to some recent articles of interest.
This past week, our local paper had a feature story on the Howard County Library System.
I really liked “Teach Us To Write Well” by Carole Angier. This piece appeared in the February issue of Literary Review, a British publication that is a book lover’s delight. 
I appreciated the Washington Post’s recent editorial in praise of President James A. Garfield. But I do wish that the editors had mentioned Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, a riveting biography of this courageous and compassionate man. 
If you search online for book reviews as much as I do, you’ll notice that content from Goodreads almost always appears near the top of your results. The New York Times recently featured a backgrounder on this site, one that is hugely popular with both avid readers and authors.
Plenty of gloom and doom but also gratitude, reasons to believe, and occasions to ponder the strange and wondrous vagaries of human nature
In the Review section of this past Sunday’s New York Times, there was a goodly helping of admonition and dire prediction, chiefly prompted by the destruction recently visited on the New York metropolitan area by Hurricane Sandy.
First, James Atlas warns of the coming submersion of New York City in Is This the End? An appropriately scary title, especially for those of us who know and love the place. (Venerating the city’s cultural riches, my mother could never understand why a person would want to live anywhere else.) 
In Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines, Benjamin Strauss and Robert Kopp paint a disturbing picture of the effect that rising sea levels will have on this country’s coastal regions. To begin with, the authors offer up this astonishing statistic: “More than six million Americans live on land less than five feet above the local high tide.” Even granted that Strauss and Kopp are describing eventualities that may be several centuries down the road, their projections are extremely disturbing. Click on What Could Disappear for maps. I did, and it just about broke my heart. Among the places slated to become a latter day Atlantis is Miami Beach, Florida, where I attended junior high and high school. Alas, farewell to the land of bougainvillea, hibiscus, cocoanut palms, and rampant overdevelopment…. (For additional searchable maps, go to Surgingeas.org.)
Finally, Erwann Michel-Kerjan and and Howard Kunreuther tackle the subject of Paying for Future Catastrophes. They begin with this statement: “Hurricane Sandy could cost the nation a staggering $50 billion, about a third of the cost of Hurricane Katrina — to date the most costly disaster in United States history.”
A collapsed complex of cabanas at Sea Bright, NJ
In the November 26/ December 3 issue of Newsweek, David Cay Johnston tallies the dangers inherent in our aging and inadequate infrastructure. Johnston goes on to suggest “12 ways to Stop the Next Sandy;” however, his ambitious manifesto will require a colossal act of will on the part of the citizens of this country, not to mention an equally colossal outlay of funds. Can it be done? Will it be done? 
(As Newsweek prepares to go digital, I’d like to express a personal sense of loss. I’ve been a subscriber since my college days in the 1960s.)
All of this would seem to portray a nation in a heap of trouble. In his book Too Much Magic, published in June of this year, James Howard Kunstler writes the following:
The British Petroleum company’s 2010 Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico tempered the public’s zest for risky deepwater drilling projects. Oil is back in the $100 range. The Fukushima nuclear meltdown in the following year sobered up many nations about the prospects for the only well-developed alternative energy method capable of powering whole cities. Whether you believe in climate change or not, or contest that it’s man-made or is not, the weather is looking a little strange. In 2011 tornados of colossal scale tore through the American South, hurricane-induced five-hundred-year floods shredded Vermont, and Texas was so drought-stricken that Texans wondered if ranching there would even be possible in the years ahead. People have begun to notice a number of signals that reality is beaming out.
He goes on to inquire plaintively: “Who can fail to notice all the obvious trouble our country is in?” 
All this is enough to send a person running for the nearest bunker. But wait – there is hope, and it has been proffered by people with vigorous minds and open hearts. I’ve already written about the solace and encouragement to be derived from the works of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Rev. Timothy Keller. And now I’m cheered by the prospect of reading Anne Lamott’s new book: 
In a recent interview in the Washington Post, she explains its rather piquant title:
I think sometimes we don’t know that what we’re doing is a form of prayer. “Help” is the main prayer. “Help” is the prayer of surrender and having a real shot at things beginning to change because you’ve finally run out of good ideas. “Help” is the hardest prayer, and it’s the most poignant. It’s a person being humbled. People say “Thanks” all the time in so many ways. Even people who don’t believe in God or in any kind of higher power notice when their family catches a break: The diagnosis was much better than it could have been; it really isn’t a transmission, it’s a timing belt; it’s something manageable instead of huge and awful. “Wow” is the praise prayer. I think every time you see a night sky full of stars, you say, “Wow.” It was so cold here today, I had to get up really early, and I stepped outside, and I was like, “Whooooa!” which is a cousin of “Wow.” It was so crisp, so beautiful. It’s like getting spritzed with a plant mister. It kind of wakes you back up.
I love The Once Born and the Twice Born, an essay by Gertrude Himmelfarb that appeared in the September 28 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Reading her cogent and graceful explication of William James The Will To Believe, I felt as though I’d been given a very special gift. (This sense was amplified by the fact of my recent immersion in the life William’s brother Henry, courtesy of Michael Gorra’s magisterial work of criticism and biography, Portrait of a Novel.)
His 1896 lecture “The Will to Believe” was prompted, James said, by the “freethinking and indifference” he encountered at Harvard. He warned his audience that he would not offer either logical or theological arguments supporting the existence of God or any particular religion, ritual or dogma. His “justification of faith” derived instead entirely from the “will” or the “right” to believe, to “adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, despite the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” James knew this would not go down well with the students and philosophers in the eminent universities. To the obvious objection that the denial of the “logical intellect” is to give up any claim to truth, he replied that it is in defense of truth that faith is justified—the truth provided not by logic or science but by experience and reflection. Moral questions, he pointed out, cannot be resolved with the certitude that comes from objective logic or science. And so with religious faith….
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, an intellectual among intellectuals, turned ninety in August.
I never ceased to be moved by the trouble to which people will go to render aid to animals in distress. A particularly impressive instance of this compassionate response is recounted in a recent Washington Post article entitled Injured Owl Is Rescued in Mount Vernon.
I deeply appreciate the sentiments voiced with wit and warmth on the occasion of Thanksgiving by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. In Family, Friends, Health and Freedom, she asked a number of friends and family members what they were thankful for. At one point, she pressed a friend to be more specific; she received this response:
“Buddy the cat. He literally came out of nowhere one night, and has never left since. He sleeps in the window most of the time, and looks in as if to say: ‘I’m home.’ He always lets the others in the pack eat first. ‘Slow down,’ I say to myself. The world on my screen may be spinning and sizzling, but Buddy’s ends up being the preferred reality.”
Speaking of matters of a feline nature, there was recent post-election news in the Metro section of the Post concerning an illustrious member of that community:
Hank the Cat, in election day garb
Finally, from the November 26 issue of the New Yorker, the recent travails of General David Petraus and others elicited this wry observation from Adam Gopnik:
Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his “poor judgment,” but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As [Philip] Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd”—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement.
Books to the Ceiling 