Book Review The Gods of Gotham

In pre-Civil War New York, a reluctant cop must find a murderer preying on child prostitutes as tensions escalate between locals and Irish immigrants. Lindsay Faye's novel The Gods of Gotham has just been nominated for an Edgar Award and in a year that was filled with outstanding historical mysteries, from The Killing of Emma Gross to The Technologists, this book stands out.

There is meticulous attention to period detail and excellent character work. The writer offers up four plausible candidates for the role of the killer and the revelation of who’s responsible will come as a surprise even for a reader paying close attention.

Be warned though, the plot is so dark it makes Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness look like a Nancy Drew mystery with a portrait of a cold-hearted madam that is chilling. Fans of the BBC America series Copper may find this book particularly engaging with its blend of crime and politics.

In Gods of Gotham the hero and investigator is a former barman who becomes a "copper star" after his life savings bur up in a fire that destroys his lodging. Timothy Wilde is no stranger to the mean streets of the city but even he is shocked when a madam who specializes in child prostitutes is protected by the Democratic Party because she's a generous benefactor.

The characters here are rich and layered, and their relationships are believable and adult.

Timothy is a complex man but his older brother Valentine is even better. There’s something twisted and tweaked about him and when we find out what it is, it explains a lot. Then there's Mercy, the do-gooder who is Timothy's childhood friend and the love of his life. As with Timothy and Valentine, there's a lot more going on with her than meets the eye.

Timothy has a large and eclectic circle of friends that include a former "oysterman" and a group of "newsies" who have banded together in an informal family. His landlady, a baker's widow, has a life filled with sorrow and a practicality that serves Timothy well.

Father Sheehy, an Irish Catholic priest who helps Timothy, is what a priest should be—a man who is ready to defend his flock—at gunpoint if necessary—and who harbors a fine, fierce outrage over injustice. He reminds us a bit of characters from the works of Andrew Vachss where the protagonists are always on the childrens' side. Then there’s Matsell and Piest, Timothy’s colleagues on the police force. They both turn out to be (again) terrific characters.

It seems likely that this is the first in a series of books about these characters and the characters are up to the task of keeping readers interested from one book to the next.

Fleur Pellerin and Twitter

Fleur Pellerin is France's Minister for the Digital Economy (a very cool-sounding job title) and she's very much involved in a current contretemps over racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic hashtags on Twitter. The country that gave us liberte, egalite and fraternite, is having some problems living up to its national motto.  (Witness the huge turnout against gay marriage over the weekend.) Read about the court case now going on here.

Top baby names of 2013

Sookie? Are you kidding me? Eithne?  Really? (I actually know someone who named her baby girl Eithne. I hope she will grow into it.)  Speaking as someone who hated her first name enough to legally get rid of it--no one ever called me by the name except for elementary school teachers on the first day of class--it constantly amazes me the names that crop up.  Millie's' on the list too. My mother's name was Mildred and her mother called her "Mert," which she despised. She was Mickey from college onward. I always thought "Mickey" was kind of cool.
"Ellie" and "Betty" are on the list too.
The boys fare a bit better. Team Jacob comes up on top in the boy's list (and Edward actually isn't on the list at all). However Mo, Bertie and Gus make the list. "Bertie?" Not even "Albert," which would be bad enough? The commplete list of baby names is here.

Review of Snow White Must Die

This is a Euro-noir from German writer Cornelia "Nele" Neuhaus. It's part of a series about two detectives working homicides in the burbs of Frankfurt. I would love to read the first three books but they haven't been translated yet. The review is posted over at Criminal Element. Head over there for a chance to win the book.

Book Review of Sarah Fine's SANCTUM

How far would you go to save someone you love?

In Sarah Fine's SANCTUM, a young woman goes to hell to retrieve her best friend, and finds the afterlife is not what she expected at all.

While the author gets major props for not mining the same old/same old tropes used in so many YA paranormals, and for injecting a strong dose of reality into the backstory of her characters, the set up is not nearly as accessible as many of the other shadowlands/otherworld/afterlife versions of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth.

SANCTUM is a well-written story by a writer who understands the genre very well and has twisted it around to make it darker and richer than the familiar aching angsty teen sex fantasy wrapped around a paranormal core. There's a little of that, along with the instant attraction that seems to be de obligatory with these books, but heroine Lela Santos (who could not be MORE out of place in her Rhode Island high school) has a mission that is more important to her than the relationship she develops with the hunky alpha male Malachi, one of the "Guards" who polices the infernal city.

There are some neat little twists to the conventions and tropes that are so overused in the genre. When Lela gets a tattoo, it's not a tramp stamp but a picture of her dead friend, and it's there as a promise and a pledge more than just skin art.

This is basically a quest novel and in many ways, it's a quantum quest in that just being on the quest changes Lela. One of the best things about the book is that it quickly leaves the high school world behind and takes us to a magical/supernatural/horrible place. The city is visually stunning, but the Judge who presides over it seems a lot like the Oracle in the MATRIX series, although she's not baking anyone cookies or smoking a cigarette. (One of the reasons we know that Lela is a tough girl is that she is smoking a cigarette at the beginning of the book, though she never does it again.)

We like Lela, who has escaped a horrible past and who has a very interesting destiny. The book includes a preview chapter of the next book, and it sounds pretty intriguing. In fact, it sounds more interesting than SANCTUM. That's one of the problems with reading the first in a series--there's a LOT of setup.

This is a promising start to a series, and it will be nice to see where it goes. Right now, it doesn't seem different enough--at least not to someone who reads A LOT of this kind of material (the Guards, in particular, seem a lot like the angels in ANGELFALL)--but Fine is a writer whose work is so enjoyable that readers will stick around to see what happens next.

Feminist Friday Bonus Deadline Hollywood's Interview with Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster is the child star who got it right and segued into a fantastic career as an adult actress and director. Check out the interview here as she talks about her career and the DeMille Award she'll get at the Golden Globes.

Feminist Fiction Friday is Back with Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson mostly writes short fiction, but her novel Fudoki was declared one of the best SF/F novels of 2003 by Publisher's Weekly. She's won a number of awards over the year and in 2012 her novella, The Man Who Bridged the Mist won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. (You can read it here for free.) She also writes poetry and essays. You can read more of her work on her website.
An editor as well as a writer, she's worked for Tor Books, Dark Horse Comics, and as content manager for Microsoft Reader.
She's' not only won awards, but she's a final judge for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Twenty of her stories are archived at the free speculative fiction site (a treasure trove of stories by everyone from Isaac Asimov to Roger Zelazny. The stories by Johnson offer a large representative sample of her work and include such award-winners as "Fox Magic" and "Ponies."

Fudoki, is the second in a planned trilogy set in ancient Japan. The first, Fox Woman, was a love story about a man and a fox woman (Kitsune.) Fudoki is about Kagaya-hime, a sometime woman warrior who may or may not be a figment of the imagination of a dying empress.
Her debut short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, contains 300 pages of her short fiction.
She gives great interviews.
"Making the Unreal Real at GeekMom.
"An Interview with Kij Johnson" at Apex Magazine
"A Terrifying Mix of Honesty and Rigor" in Clarkesworld Magzine
Here's a Los Angeles Review of Books review on At the Mouth of the River of Bees where the reviewer focused on the sexual politicsof the stories.
If you have a few minutes today, sample one of Kij Johnson's stories and come away refreshed and impressed.

Catmoji a delivery system for cat cuteness

I do not, as a general rule, email cute cat pictures and adorable pet videos. (I made an exception for the Siamese cat "singing" the theme from Game of Thrones and I think the "Engineer's Guide to Cats" is hilarious). But one of the things I do every day is check in with Cat of the Day and I have been known to pin some of those pictures on my board at Pinterest, along with the noir book covers and the photos of haunted places. A friend of mine sent me the link to catmoji, which is basically a site for all the cat pictures everyone has and wants to share. Forget cute babies and fuzzy puppies, they go straight for the cat cuteness. If you like looking at cute cat pictures, check catmoji out.

I pick five short stories you shouldn't miss...

Over at his blog Death By Killing, Chris Rhatigan is running his annual "Five You Can't Miss" recommendations for short stories. I weigh in today. You can read my picks here.

Photo by Zsuzsanna Kilian

If one of your New Year's Resolutions was to read more books, one place to start is by reading more book blogs to help you sift through the literary silt to find the gold. Here's a  list of top book blogs compiled at Blogrank from a variety of sources (including Feedburner, Google PR and Alexa).

Z is for Zebra

Courtesy: My Cute Graphics

I'm in word snoot mode today, thinking about why my Q and X keyboard  keys aren't more worn because I am VERY fond of words that begin with those letters and even fonder of words that use both--quincunx, exquisite, quixotic. (If you want to see more words that have both letters, or any other letter combinations, check out Scrabble Wizard.)
I started wondering why Z is the least-used letter. Are there that many fewer words that start with Z?  (I mean sure, that would be the obvious conclusion but what about some facts?) As they say on NPR's marketplace, "let's run the numbers."
There's a  site called words by letter that lets you search words by length, by definition and by suffix and prefix (two words with Xs).
Vocabulary.com will give you interesting factoids like 100 SAT words that begin with W,X,Y & Z. There's only one for X (xenophobia) but seven for Z.  So that's a little counter-intuitive.
Over at TalkTalk where there's a dictionary of difficult words, the Z word list begins with zaibatsu (from the Japanese, meaning a large industrial or financial corporation) and ends with zymotic (defined as: a. pertaining to fermentation; due to development of germs entering body from outside; n. contagious or infectious disease.) I will definitely be back to that site because I love obscure words.
If I still had a paper dictionary, I'd just count the number of pages devoted to Z letters and compare it to the number of pages devoted to E.  Further research must be done!  But not today. 

K is for Katherine

Photo by Brian Lary

I learned to type my junior year in high school--thank you Pela Love Bobbitt, and I've been touch-typing ever since. Because I don't have to look at my keyboard when I type, I don't notice when the letters start rubbing off the tops of the keys until someone else sits down to use my computer and is confronted with a nearly blank keyboard.
Right now, out of 26 letters, the only ones that are still labeled are Q, P, F, G, J, Z, and X. 
I got curious. "Everyone" knows that the most-used letter in English is E but what are the least-used letters?
According to Wikipedia (don 't you love Wikipedia?) The letters least frequently used are:
Z
Q
J
X
K
V
B
P
It makes sense that I use "K" more than most people because my name begins with K but why am I typing so many more words that begin with V and B than everyone else? Do I send that many emails to my friend Berkeley?  And V?  It's not like I write about vampires that much. It's a mystery.

Tales of the Misbegotten: Star Quality

I am days from finishing Starcaster, the novel I'm writing in a shared world environment with authors Charlotte English, MeiLin Miranda and Joseph Robert Lewis.  I have promised myself that I won't write any more short stories until Starcaster and Misbegotten (due in May!) are finished, but this story came to me while I was perusing a gossip site and it would not go away.  It is set in the paranormal L.A. that is the setting for Misbegotten (and the stories in L.A. Nocturne and L.A. Nocturne II).

Star Quality

When the Star found the Stranger lounging on the $12,000 sofa in his trailer, he wasn't afraid at first, just annoyed.

His first question wasn't "Who are you?" because frankly, he didn't care.

Nor did he ask, "What do you want?" because that was obvious. Like everyone else, he wanted to tear off a little piece of star-shine for himself.

The star, whose name was Denis Flynn, had been a child actor who had had a rocky transition into adult roles, languishing in horror movies with numbers after their titles and doing television guest roles as ex-boyfriends on sitcoms and designated victims on crime shows.

There'd been the obligatory bar fights and rehab stints and everyone assumed he'd be another TMZ headline before he turned 30 but three years ago he'd done a Robert Downey, Jr. and blown everyone away in an indie movie called Slanguage. Since then they'd been offering Ryan Gosling his cast-offs and he'd been balls-deep in quality pussy.

When he saw the Stranger, whose name was Alex Mariana, Flynn was annoyed because Alex was a blip and when you're a star, there are people who are supposed to take care of blips before they cross your radar.

So while he made a mental note to make his personal assistant's life miserable for not dealing with Alex, the question Flynn asked was, "How did you get in here?"

And actually, it was a serious question because after a series of stalker incidents involving a female director working on the lot, security was supposed to be tight.

"Wasn't that hard," Alex said with a grin, and just like that, Denis was looking at a perfect double of the movie's cinematographer.

"Shit," Flynn said as the shape-shifter melted back into his original shape.

"So what do you want?"

Alex grinned wider. "I'm here to talk business," he said.

Alex had to give the Star credit. He'd been pulling one of these jobs once a year for the last decade and almost without exception he'd had to spell things out for the marks. It wasn't that they were stupid; they just couldn't quite wrap their heads around the idea that they were so vulnerable. Flynn, though, he seemed to grasp the situation perfectly right away.

Instead of launching into a lot of hand-wringing and macho posturing, Flynn just went over to the full-size fridge his assistant kept stocked with gluten-free snacks and artisanal glacier water, and pulled out a one-ounce bag of organic kale chips.

He sat down in a chair that matched the sofa, kicked back and started snarfing his chips.

"Do me," he said. "I want to see your me."

Alex obliged. "We're the same height," Alex said, so that makes it easier. I'm pretty flexible, so I can go up or down an inch or two. But if you were really six one like it says on IMDB, we wouldn't be a perfect match.

Alex could tell the star didn't like that but he just shrugged. "Fair enough," he said.

Flynn seemed mesmerized by Alex's counterfeit of himself.

"Change back," he finally ordered. "Looking at you is too much like being in a dream and seeing myself dead."

It was quiet in the trailer for a bit, quiet enough Alex could hear each individual crunch as Flynn ate his chips. Finally Flynn screwed up the bag and looked around as if waiting for someone to take it from him and dispose of it properly.

When no one materialized, he set his trash on the birdseye maple coffee table that drew the trailer's décor together with its golden hues.

"How much?" he asked.

"A hundred thousand," Alex replied.

Flynn lifted his eyebrows. "You think small," he said.

"I'm not greedy," Alex replied.

"And if I don't pay?"

"There are so many options," Alex said. "Couch jumping on a talk show; melting down in a racist rant; propositioning a male masseuse."

"The couch jumping was a good one," Flynn said.

"Thank you."

"So how does this work? You want me to write you a check?"

"Money orders. In thousand dollar increments. Have your assistant buy them at separate Western Union branches all over the city. Don't fill out the buyer's section, I'll take care of that."

"And how do I get you the money?"

"Put it in a Fred Siegel bag and give it to that hot girlfriend of yours."

For the first time Flynn looked angry.

"Leave Danica out of this."

"She'll never even see me," Alex promised. "Get the money together," he said. "I'll let you know where and when Danica can make the drop."

It turned out that within three miles of the studio in either direction there were more than a hundred PayDay Plus and Paycheck Advance and Western Union franchises and it only took Flynn's assistant three hours to buy100 money orders.

He didn't bother to ask Flynn what the money orders were for because he never questioned his boss, and Flynn wouldn't have told him anyway.

He did, however, make a discreet phone call to the National Enquirer to tell them Flynn might be falling back into his old drug-buying ways. It wouldn't be the first time he'd scored some cash for a hot tip.

Paris in Motion--video by Mayeul Akpovi

Posted on Arch Daily today (part three) is a great time-lapse video of the City of Lights.

And speaking of southern cooking...

Check out the Daily Shot's listing "The 10 Best Southern Food Blogs" here. How can you resist blogs called Biscuits & Such or Sinful Southern Sweets?

I'm the new Southern Cooking Editor at BellaOnline

That's right y'all. I've got another new gig--"Southern Cooking" editor over at BellaOnline.com. Check me out here. I spent a little over a year writing about chocolate for the website's food and wine channel, waiting for this topic to open up. And now it's mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
All those grease-spattered recipes I inherited from my mother and grandmothers will now be unleashed on the web. (And none too soon--some of the recipes are so faded I can barely read them and in a year or two they could be as lost to time as fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.)
Coming up in the next few weeks will be recipes for George Washington's birthday cake (a delicious cake with cherry and walnuts that I've never found anywhere else), directions for soups and winter vegetable casseroles and even a little White Trash cooking. And in the summer there will be barbecue and potato salad and strawberry shortcake with honest-to-God shortcakes and not those mushy sponge thingies they sell at the grocery store.
Stop by and bookmark the site.

Huffington Post on the Most Romantic Spot in Paris

The Ponts Des Arts bridge with the love padlocks. Read more about it here and click through the slideshow.

Must have been that extra slice of buche noel.

The official kilogram kept in Paris and used as a standard, is gaining weight. And nobody quite knows why. The full story here.

The word of the year is Hashtag

The American Dialect Society is at it again. Click here for their roundup of best new words on Mental Floos.

Vulcan's Fire Salt

Do you know the kind of damage you can do with a $50 gift certificate to The Spice House?  A lot.
I've been trolling through their catalogue and already have a list of six things I'd like to get, including green mango powder, which I've never tried and have been wanting to.
This hot salt (Vulcan Fire Salt) caught my eye though.  It pretty much has everything a spice blend should have.

A site that will give you the inside scoop on Paris

Heather Stimmler-Hall's blog, Secrets of Paris, has been online since 1999. Her publishing company, Fleur de Lire, publishes (among other books), the Naughty Guide to Paris.

Download Paris Pastry App

New for the new year: our favorite foodie expatriate, David Lebovitz (Living the Sweet Life in Paris) has a Paris Pastry app you can download (through iTunes) of his Paris Pastry App.

Sign up to get 52 stories by 7 of France's top authors!

From Le French Book site:  sign up to receive (free) a daily or weekly email featuring 52 short stories written (in collaboration) by seven French authors.The stories are in English, so even if one of your New Year's Resolutions was that 2013 would be the year you learned French, you can ease yourself into it gradually.

Book Review Maps of the Edge by Ian Creasey

One of the writers I discovered during the 365 Day Challenge was Ian Creasey. Maps of the Edge is a collection of spec fic stories by Creasey published in 2011. (His novella, The Strawberry Thief, was published last October. I can't wait to read it.) Creasey identifies as a science fiction writer, but pigeonholing him into one genre really doesn't seem fair, especially after reading through this collection, which is a small sample of the more than 50-odd stories he's sold to magazines and anthologies.

The stories range over a wide spectrum of emotions. "Reality 2.0" is a hilarious riff on a new product from Microsoft, a re-imagination of math called "WonderNumbers" that takes all the hard work out of math, much to the dismay of mathematicians. "Now you can divide by zero" is the product's sales pitch for the software, which does away with a lot of inconvenient math concepts and formulae. "This is How it Feels" is a haunting story about loss and grief that describes the feeling as "a compost heap where rats endlessly gnaw over the scraps of your heart." 

"Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone" is a story about a mother and a daughter that also touches on one of the core concepts and conceits of the collection, the persistence of personality in an electronic afterlife. Many of the stories are surrounded and shaped by conspiracy theories and there are references throughout to a Conspiracy Channel--the people who work there and some of the shows that appear. And who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory?

Creasey is not just a storyteller, he's an actual wordsmith--a term that's thrown around much too easily. (In the opening story, "Erosion," he describes clouds as looking like "celestial loft insulation" and the phrase is just perfect.)

You don't have to like science fiction to like Creasey's stories but if you do, you will love them.

After Christmas Sale!

12 Nights of Christmas, my collection of dark takes on the traditional holiday song, is now available FREE on Smashwords. And coming soon--free on Amazon as well. Now that the holidays are over and it's a new year, why not pick up some free reading?

Because geeks will continue to rule in 2013

Happy New Year to all...

Piers Morgan has a point

I'm not a big fan of Piers Morgan but this ridiculous call for his deportation in the wake of his statements about gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings makes me want to deport myself to somewhere where people can talk about the subject without going non-linear. Read his piece on the subject on the Daily Mail site.

Not everything is online.

Every day of last year, I went looking for a new short story to post on the 365 Short Story a Day challenge. I had decided that I would only post one story per writer and that I would not post a story that another participant had posted. Two of us posted Evan Hunter's "The Last Spin" and I think there was an overlap on one of Thomas Pluck's stories, but the only time I broke my self-imposed rule on purpose was the day Ray Bradbury died. I had already posted his "Small Assassin" story but on that day I posted "A Sound of Thunder," which is one of my all-time favorite time travel stories. Jimmy Callaway's "Night Train to Mondo Fine," is probably second on the list, with Brian Trent's "Down Memory Line" third.
But I digress.
One of the stories that was posted early on was Lord Dunsany's "Two Bottles of Relish" and visitors to the 365 site were consistently lured there by the story post. I've been looking at those posts for a year and saying to myself, "I must read that story."

Maybe next year....

This time last year I enthusiastically signed on to Benoit Lelievre's Smoth Criminals fiction challenge.  The idea was to read seven books in various genres--a hardboiled classic, for instance, and a book with a psychopath at the center. (I was going to read Dexter Darkly Dreaming, the first in a series of novels on which the cable series is based.) Alas, I did not complete even one of the books I'd planned to read. But having been presented with the challenge, I now have my reading cut out for me next year.

I did however, take part in Brian Lindenmuth's 365 short story a day challenge. Four more days...I've actually read ahead, so I only have two more to read and write up. I made a decision to only feature one story per writer, which forced me out of my comfort zone. (I could have posted 365 stories just by Stephen King and Ray Bradbury.) I read some tremendous stories. The two that stood out for me were W.D. County's "Plastic Soldiers" and Ken Liu's "Paper Menagerie." Both stories are about children and they couldn't be more different.

Call yourself a reader? Publisher's Weekly picks the "10 Most Difficult Books"

Of course James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is on the list. smack dab in the middle as it happens. I've read it, but all I really remember is Molly Bloom's soliloquy and the only reason I remember that is I saw Fionnula Flanagan's fabulous one-woman show, James Joyce's Women. Also  on the list--Virginia Woolf's To a Lighthouse, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, and Women and Men by Joseph McElroy, a book I've never heard of that PW dubs "a post-modern meganovel." You can see the whole list here.

Alice Rivlin is my heroine

Sometimes in Hollywood it seems like women become irrelevant the moment they hit 40. By 50, they are invisible, with the exception of Meryl Streep. In Washington, though, a woman is just hitting her stride in her 50s. And they don't have a mandatory sell-by date. A smart woman can work forever and be taken seriously, and be listened to. Alice Rivlin will be 82 in March and there she is on MSNBC explaining her take on the fiscal cliff. Once an advisor to President Clinton, she's now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of President Obama's debt commission. In another generation, Ms. Rivlin would have been sitting on a front porch somewhere crocheting a comforter. Now she's trying to fix the economy. I love living in the 21st century. I look forward to being 82 and still having a voice. 

Help Dennis Lehane find his dog...

And he'll name a character after you.
Get the 411  here on TMZ.

Ellen Datlow needs your help!

She's raising money for her next anthology, Fearful Symmetries, via a Kickstarter campaign. She wants to raise $25,000 and she's a little over a third of the way done with 13 days remaining. She's offering terrific rewards at all levels of the campaign, and you can support this project for as little as $5.
If you read short stories--particularly in the speculative fiction/science fiction/fantasy/horror genres--you have read  one or more of the anthologies edited by Datlow. Her birthday is next Monday (New Year's Eve), so why not give her an early birthday preesent and pledge a little cash?
Watch Datlow talk about the project here.

No More Mr. Bad Cat--an Orange Julius Adventure

Photo by Vavoom 09

I've been thinking about writing a series of children's stories about a bullied kid and the stray cat he adopts. I really don't know what I'm going to do with the stories, but here's the first one.

No More Mr. Bad Cat

An Orange Julius Adventure

By Katherine Tomlinson

Brian was sitting outside the principal's office when his mom got to the school. She gave him a worried look and a quick kiss on the head before Mrs. Shimura opened the door and said, "Won't you come in Ms. Oakley?" which is what she called Brian's mom instead of "mom."

Brian got up to follow his mom into the office but Mrs. Shimura looked down at him and said, "I need to talk to your mom alone just a moment," she said. "Why don't you wait out here?"

Brian looked at his mom. She mother nodded at him to let him know it was okay. "I'll be right back," she said and then closed the door behind her.

When the door opened again, Brian's mother looked upset. "Let's go home," she said to Brian, so he got up from where he was sitting.

"I'll see you tomorrow Brian," Mrs. Shimura said and Brian mumbled "Okay," even though his mom always told him not to mumble.

John Milton: On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Photo by Magic Marie

Possibly the best course I took in college was a seminar on John Milton taught by the late poet/novelist Reynolds Price. One of the first things we read was Milton's Christmas poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." It was written in 1629 when Milton was 21.

My favorite verse of the poem (love the rhyme of "whist" and "kissed")  is below.You can read it in its entirety here on Bartleby.

But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
His reign of peace upon the earth began.
The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kissed,	65
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.

Craig's List--Setting the bar high (not)

My recent experience with a celebrity chef who hasn't paid me notwithstanding, I remain in love with Craig's List as a source of gigs. I was, however, bemused by a listing today that included these requirements:  Must be able to read/write in English, have a keyboard and an internet connection.  Good thing I have a keyboard and I know how to use it.

It's the little things that mean a lot!

Imagine how excited I was to get a royalty statement for my contribution to an anthology published last year. I'm accustomed to looking up my own stats but this book was published through a "legacy" publisher and the statement was sent in the mail with the postage franked on the envelope. I use Forever stamps so I had to look up the current postage rate for first class mail. (It's 45 cents, in case you didn't know.) My share of royalties?  A whopping 66 cents!  Woo hoo!  I am booking that Caribbean cruise now.

Christmas in Paris

If you can't be in the City of Lights for the holidays, you can always log on to Christmas in Paris and look at the pretty pictures of the places where you could be staying.

Paris is calling!

Banana Bread Recipe

Photo by Romek Kowalski

It's been a busy week here at Kattomic Energy and I haven't done much baking for the holidays. (My mother used to whip herself into a cookie-making frenzy but I take a more conservative approach to prepping for Christmas, which is a lot less stressful.)  Last night, though, I whipped up a batch of banana bread and this morning, I notice, it's mostly gone.  The elves must have gotten into the fridge.

My loaf pans are on loan to a friend who's got a big catering gig so I made this in a square pan. It came out delicious.

EASY AND LUSCIOUS BANANA BREAD

1 1/2 cups of flour (sometimes I make the 1/2 cup flour whole wheat flour)

1 cup granulated sugar (if bananas are very ripe, I usually use just 3/4 cup)

1/2 cup sour cream

1 cup mashed bananas (about two medium bananas)

1 stick butter (unsalted)

1 tsp. baking soda

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs and vanilla.

Combine flour and baking soda.

Add to wet ingredients.

Add mashed bananas and sour cream.

OPTIONAL:   1/2 cup chopped walnuts--add with bananas and sour cream

Bake at 350 for 45-60 minutes. (Because I used a square baking pan this took less time than usual.)

Also optional--you can make a glaze of confectioner's sugar and milk to drizzle over the bread if you want.

This bread is yummy right out of the oven and is also lovely cold for breakfast. (And apparently also for midnight snacks.)

 

My sentiments exactly

Of all the things I've seen posted in the wake of the shooting in Newton, CT, this pithy comment made the most sense to me.