Hello all. Hope everybody's having a great weekend. Me, I have a huge speckleware pot of homemade vegetable soup on the stove, the house smells wonderful, Mom's having a good day, and I've been rereading the spookiest book I ever read.

You might think, judging from older posts of mine, that I never read anything except ghost stories, but the book I have in mind has no supernatural happenings whatsoever. Some of the things that do happen SEEM supernatural, but they are a result of mystification and illusion, not the paranormal.

This book is called THE THREE COFFINS (in the US; in the UK it was published as THE HOLLOW MAN) and was written in 1935 by American author John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), a master of the murder mystery subgenre called "the locked room mystery."

Its plot features not one but two "impossible" murders built around a revenge plot--i.e., suppose Abel had survived Cain's attack and vanished, only to return years later to settle scores? Misdirection galore, with hints of premature burial, vampirism, madness, stage illusions, and writing that stops you with magisterial shivers; for example, this excerpt from the end of chapter one, when a mysterious man enters a private room behind the bar of a London pub to issue a warning to one of the murder victims:

"The door had closed. . .before anybody moved or spoke. And the door also closes on the only clear view we have of the events leading up to {the night of the murders}. The rest lies in flashes and glimpses. . .The first deadly walking of the hollow man took place on that last-named night, when the side streets of London were quiet with snow and the three coffins of the prophecy were filled at last."

There is comedy in the unfolding of the story, only to be expected when the major character is Carr's series detective, the rotund Dr. Gideon Fell (an apparent inspiration for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe); but more often than not a plot twist will make you jump out of your skin, or a sentence will startle you into remembering how eerie the whole situation is: ". . .the murderer was invisible before the eyes of witnesses, and still he had left no footprint in the snow."

Much of this atmosphere depends on the setting: a snowy February in a London between the two world wars, with comfort and light still in the fashionable areas of town, while literally streets away the poor live in single dingy rooms, in a world that barely noted the impact of the Great Depression because they had always lived in poverty; a post-Dickensian London where nothing has changed, in short, save the slums are shabbier and the contrasts more stark, and would remain so until the blitz mandated change.

More frightening hints that behind that facade not all is as it seems:
one character confides in another a secret that ultimately kills two men in this way. " 'Three of us were once buried alive. Only one escaped.' {The confidant} said, 'And how did you escape?' To which {he} answered, calmly: 'I didn't, you see. I was one of the two who did not escape.'"

It's all explained in the end in the tradition of the old original Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe, where all supernatural machinery turns out to be human chicanery--but it's a long cold scary ride until then. This would be worth a read if you can locate it; most of Carr's books are out of print, but some are available online at Amazon and ebay. This one, perhaps his most accomplished, certainly is.

Thanks for holding your yawns till the end. And on that note, fair thee well.

Because it's RAINING here in East TN, hallelujah! And may have more over the next several days. We've been so low so long on rainfall that this won't come close to making up our deficit, but every little bit helps.

Listening to the classical Christmas station again today, in between trips to town, lunch and playing games on the puter. Did a little billpaying, a little Christmas shopping. Willard and I made a special trip thru the middle of town to see the sad ruins of a century-plus old church that burnt almost to the ground Mon. AM. Sad sight; it had Gothic windows, stained glass and a beautiful old sanctuary with some killer acoustics. Sang there several times in my checkered career and can attest to that. Only things they managed to save were the bell from the church tower and the handbells used by the kids' handbell choir. Fire marshal et. al. think the fire began when a socket overloaded; a lighted Christmas tree and a piano's heating rod had been plugged in via extension cord in the area where the fire broke out. Guys, whatever you do, please be careful about things like that!

The congregation is having a meeting tonight at our local college to begin to discuss rebuilding plans. Pray for them, please. In a little town like this, where everybody knows everybody, I'm friends or at least acquaintances with a lot of them, all good people.

On the way home we noticed the lady with the exuberant display of lighted figures outside her house has a PENGUIN! as light-encrusted as the other figures. Quite a menagerie with all the reindeer and etc. Oh well--at least it's a penguin in good taste. Could've been the big brother of the one in the Wal-Mart candy aisle; the infamous Penguin Pooper! Talk about disturbing!

Hope everybody is having a good day. Sylvia, check in when you can--hope the weather's better out there! And with that personal note, fair thee well.

Mom got tired of looking for something to watch on TV (channels, channels everywhere and not a one to watch! Coleridge is having a fit!) so she turned to a satellite classical Christmas music station. The first selection I heard was the tail end of "Hallelujah!" from Handel's MESSIAH.

Brings back some fond memories of my days in the alto section of the chorale at the junior college I attended first. It was the custom then, some twenty-five years ago, for us to spend the entire first quarter of classes learning selections from MESSIAH to sing as our big Christmas concert.

MESSIAH has remained a favorite of mine ever since. So engrained in my musical memory has it become that I can still sing whole sections of it without the score in front of me. In the intervening years I've learned more about its composer, George Frideric Handel, and about the circumstances of its composition.

Handel (1685-1759) was a contemporary of another great German Baroque composer, Johann Sebastian Bach; the two never met and indeed seem not ever to have known of each other's existence, let alone music--which seems odd to us, whose world is so much less circumscribed thanks to modern communications. One author has said that as organists, Bach and Handel were equals and had no other peers. Originally, after a youth spent as a musical prodigy, Kapellmeister (chapel music director) for the Elector Georg of Hanover, Handel took a wandering spell; he settled in England in 1712, remaining there the rest of his life. During that time, his employer Elector Georg inherited the throne of his cousin, British queen Anne; although Handel composed more music in honor of King George I, he worked for other employers as well.

Handel had been composing oratorios--a musical form similar to opera, but presented more in the manner of recitals than staged--since 1732. After some years spent composing one failed opera after another, he accepted a commission from the viceroy of Ireland to come to Dublin to present a charity concert. For this performance Handel brought along a new oratorio called MESSIAH, which he had composed in a great fit of inspiration in twenty-four days, between August 22 and September 14, 1741. It is reported, from the eyewitness account of one of his servants, that when he completed the "Hallelujah!" chorus, Handel broke down and cried, declaring, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself."

MESSIAH debuted in Dublin on April 13, 1742, and was an overwhelming success; not so in London the following year, although the new king, George II (Handel's old boss having died in 1727) was so moved by "Hallelujah!" that he got to his feet while it was sung, followed by the whole audience--a custom still followed at live performances of MESSIAH to this day. Eventually it would come to be an annual event--someone on the globe is always performing MESSIAH at Christmas.

Kind of sad, for only its opening, from the brilliant overture up through the chorus "His yoke is easy and his burden is light" are related to the scriptures about prophecies of Christ's coming and his birth. An equally extensive section is devoted to the passion and death of Christ, ending with "Hallelujah!" and followed by a shorter section on the resurrection.

For my own tastes, I prefer the choruses of the Passion section. One is "All we like sheep have gone astray" (based on Isaiah 53:6) and is distinguished by a dizzy major key merry-go-round that abruptly changes from F to an adagio in D minor, in which the soprano and bass follow the words "and the Lord hath laid on him (the iniquities of us all)" to a perfect two-octave D flat spread; the soprano note hangs like an icicle for a full six beats, while the bass continues for a full fourteen beats on that one note, a rumble of meditative pain.

The other choruses I favor are the G minor largo "Behold the Lamb of God," based on John 1:29, and the F minor "Surely he hath borne our griefs," based on Isaiah 53: 4-5.

Truly it is a shame that most people think of this masterful oratorio only as Christmas music; it's brilliant, ravishing and inspiring any time of year. And with that magisterial judgment, fair thee well.

Yep, I "got the rollin' arthuritis gettin' down in the record reviews--"

Let me say that I am a Dwight Yoakam fan of many years' standing. When I worked in an office I alternated a DY poster on my wall corkboard with George Strait (STILL fills out a pair of Wranglers better than any man on earth) and Marty Stuart.

That said, when I first listened to his October 2007 release DWIGHT SINGS BUCK, a CD consisting entirely of Buck Owens songs, my initial reaction was SWEET BABY DWIGHT, HONEY BUNNY DARLIN' LOVE OF MY HEART, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!

There are some rules for doing tribute albums, you see. Never, EVER, exaggerate the vocal tics of the person to whom you're paying tribute. Never use a Ray Price shufflebeat when a Buck Owens 4/4 will do. Do not introduce a Johnny Horton hiccup into a Buck Owens song. Do not play an intro that fools your listener into thinking you're about to do a Johnny Cash cover. Do not turn a classic country weeper into a rockin' romp. And do not, under ANY circumstances, change the melody of a song in such a manner as to render it totally unrecognizable as the song of your intent.

DY does all that. I found myself yearning not for his slurry vocals but for Buck's clarion tenor. The percussion (hence the reference to a Ray Price shufflebeat) is often frenetic and therefore annoying. On the track "Above and Beyond" one finds the inappropriate Johnny Horton hiccup. The intro to "Down on the Corner of Love" is all but identical to Cash's old recording of "Guess Things Happen That Way." The classic country weeper "Under Your Spell Again" almost did make me cry; it's NOT THE KIND OF SONG YOU WANNA HEAR ROCKED UP! And as for "Together Again"--Dwight sings it in such a fashion that it's not even remotely like the melody of Buck's great hit--only the steel guitar solo at the end resembles that.

Eventually I decided the only way I could bear to listen to the CD a second time was to dismiss its purported tribute to Buck Owens and regard it as simply a DY CD on which he was performing Buck Owens songs. That worked better, and I can say that "I Don't Care(Just As Long As You Love Me)", "Cryin' Time Again," and "Love's Gonna Live Here" are good, especially the Don Rich style tenor vocals of Eddie Perez. "Close Up the Honky Tonks", the video of which was directed by Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, worries me a bit, because except for about six bars in the verse it's melodically a virtual ringer for "Heartaches By the Number." (I actually sat there and sang "Heartaches By the Number" over it; it works.) And "Excuse Me (I Think I've Got a Heartache)" is really fine, a honkin' number to the bone--but since I always preferred Reno and Smiley's acoustic version even to Buck's, I gotta say that's praise with faint damns.

So my advice would be threefold: if you really want the full flavor of these songs, hunt out Buck's originals; write this off as one of DY's interesting eccentricities; and hunt out DY's own great recordings, especially GUITARS, CADILLACS, & ETC., HILLBILLY DELUXE, BUENOS NOCHES FROM A LONELY ROOM, and his best in my estimation, THIS TIME. Hey, guys, it's only my opinion--and maybe I'm just too much of a purist of both Buck's and DY's music to appreciate this one. Till next time, fair thee well.

Fascinating what you can come up with when you're sort of letting the brain run on the offtracks. I commented to Sylvia that perhaps I should do some research to see whether there is any connection between Charles Dickens of A CHRISTMAS CAROL fame and the Irving Berlin song "White Christmas." Not such a crazy idea as it sounds; in the forward to THE COMPLETE GHOST STORIES OF CHARLES DICKENS, editor Peter Haining writes:

. . .in some quarters A CHRISTMAS CAROL is credited with having 'invented' the idea of white Christmases! For, according to Prof. Hubert Lamb of the climatic research unit at East Anglia University, snowy Christmases are actually very infrequent.
(Introduction, p.10)

Professor Lamb goes on to explain that he did some research into past weather records for the time around Christmas, and found that for the first eight years of Dickens's life, there was either exceptionally heavy frost or snow at Christmas. This was not usual, he said; in England there is generally clear if cold weather in the days immediately preceding and following Christmas.

Hence Dickens made it a snowy Christmas in London for purposes of his "Ghost of an idea." As for the snowy Christmases of his childhood, there are two possible explanations for them: A) the period of the last so-called Little Ice Age, which ended more or less in 1850; or B) weather changes related to the violent eruption of an Indonesian volcano in 1815 (Dickens was born in 1812) that affected weather as far away as the United States for some three years; 1816 was, in fact, so cold and wet that it is remembered as "the year without a summer."

Unfortunately for my original premise--i.e., did Dickens's penchant for the idea of white Christmases influence Irving Berlin, who is describing a "white Christmas" while looking out over Beverly Hills--there doesn't seem to be enough information out there for me to make a connection.

However, since I have a weakness for research for its own sake, I did find a transcript of a Minnesota Public Radio broadcast by Curtis Gilbert about Dickens's effect on the way we celebrate Christmas in the modern era. (http://www.minnesota.publicradio.org/features, or type in, as I did, charles dickens and white Christmases, and click on MPR on the page that comes up) Gilbert talks about the Puritan movement in England in the seventeenth century and its influence, which had all but obliterated the celebration of Christmas as a festival of joy; about the United States Congress meeting on Christmas Day until the 1850s; and how many people worked a full day on Christmas. One professor who contributed to the piece pointed out that Dickens was not portraying the season in A CHRISTMAS CAROL as it was in early Victorian England, but more as his fantasy of an ideal childhood and an ideal Christmas.

Me, I'm glad times have changed. Peace and joy to all and until next time fair thee well.