My big sister, Lucy, in 1949 at Biloxi lighthouse

The Mississippi Gulf Coast figures prominently in my family’s history since my father’s relatives are in southern Mississippi and Alabama. Also, as a poor Methodist preacher’s family in Illinois, about the only vacation we could afford when I was a kid was to head south in our old Buick, camp out with relatives, and then spend a week at the campgrounds the Methodist church maintained on the coast.

The original Biloxi seawall, now hidden beneath sand

In those days, there was no beach in Biloxi. There was simply an enormous seawall consisting of steps that one could walk down to be closer to the water to fish. Which step one chose depended on the tides. As a child of 4 and 5 I remember that close, black water as frightening, but my father managed to coax me down the steps by showing me how to use crab-nets baited with bacon. Here is a post card from that era showing the wall; the bit of sand you see in that card was the Gulf floor and was seldom visible.

Huge manmade beach covering the original seawall

These days, that magnificent seawall is covered by countless tons of white sand as seen above. I suppose I prefer the beach, but it seems a shame that that seawall is history. The sand was pumped onto the seawall in 1951 (see MS History for background on this and other Mississippi public works).

Famous Biloxi lighthouse

An indelible memory of that childhood time is the famous Biloxi lighthouse. Here are several good links on it. I’ll let you read about it for yourself.

• Biloxi Lighthouse
• Web Lighthouses
• Through the years
• Drawing
• early photo
• good vintage MS vintage postcards
• Lighthouses of the United States: Mississippi

The OTHER Biloxi lighthouse

West of the historical lighthouse, on a small promontory jutting out from the shore, there is another lighthouse, pictured above. I can find no mention of it anywhere! It appears to be a functional lighthouse, but it’s not listed among the three lighthouses in Mississippi. If anyone knows something about this one, I would enjoy learning about it.

Shrimp boat (singular!) heads out for the day

In those days, shrimping was huge on the Gulf Coast. It still exists, but not like it used to exist. It was already in serious decline because of all the cheap shrimp shipped in from Asian shrimp farms, then the catastrophic BP oil spill damned near dealt it a death blow. I hope it recovers.

A considerable distance out from Biloxi are a series of barrier islands (see Barrier Islands of Mississippi). One of our family treats in those days was to take a commercial boat out to Ship Island–one of those islands. Halfway out, the boat would stop and haul up nets of live oysters. (Vegans hold your ears!) The shells were cracked open for us and we downed them while they were, literally, still quivering.

Piers that once reached far out into the Gulf remain demolished

The Mississippi Gulf Coast has a long history of recovering from assaults from nature. It’s always bounced back, although sometimes it takes longer than others. The trauma of Hurricane Katrina is still evident. These pictures were taken just this past year. Notice the devastation that still exists both on the coast and inland.

Scarred landscape of Biloxi remains–buildings once stood where those blank squares are

But they’re slowly rebuilding.

One rebuilt pier

Part of the economic engine for that rebuilding is casino money; they were rebuilt first, of course. I don’t know what I think about the casinos. The Biloxi of my youth was poor, poor, poor, poor, poor–a sleepy little town on the water. Now there are jobs. And, people should be allowed to gamble if they wish. I don’t believe in legislating “morality,” ever! But, I, myself, don’t enjoy the casinos in Biloxi. (Vegas is another matter! That can be fun…if one doesn’t gamble.) The Biloxi casinos are full of people my age (old) obsessively frittering away their social security checks. Few are smiling. Mainly, I see grim futility. Here are a couple of links that speak to the issue of casinos on the Gulf Coast: here and here).

One of many casinos

Whether you’re into the casinos or just a new place to visit that’s a (long) day’s drive, Biloxi is only 9 hours away from Tampa. That’s really not that far. The casinos make for cheaper rooms, so that’s good. I highly recommend the trip and the experience.

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There are places you miss more than you realize until you visit them again. The Southwest is one of those places.

Recently I visited a friend of 43 years. He’s only recently moved to Gallup. I’d never been there before, but I hope to go again.

The title of this post pretty much says it all in regard to the Southwest. It is so peaceful.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Florida. I park on the roof of the Tampa International Airport so I can walk out into our huge sky with towering clouds at night, overlooking vast stretches of water. But, when at ground level in Florida, there’s a claustrophobic shortness to the horizon; things are too close.

In the Southwest, they stretch for miles as if one were standing on a tall building. That space brings peace.

And the vegetation! It’s interplanetary. It’s not lush as it is here, but it is exotic in the extreme.

My friend asked me what I wanted to do. I said, “Nothing!” And nothing is what we did. We simply sat and talked and relaxed on this porch below for several days. What a treat.

Ashes of the Earth

Something new out of something old

There are many types of sleuths and mysteries beyond Mrs. Marple in Agatha Christie’s locked-room cozies or the hard-boiled private eye, Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s yarns. One of the many types is the police procedural that’s become the tired mainstay of so much television fare. Yet, a master such as Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, was able to transform that genre into something completely unique by his choice of context. Thus, Asimov created the science-fiction police procedural novel.

The author, Eliot Pattison, has, I believe, created his own mystery niche, mysteries within the context of the collision of cultures. These cultural collisions have taken several forms. What first got me hooked on Pattison, were his Inspector Shan novels (see inkwatu.com/2011/01/01/the-eliot-pattison-inspector-shan-series/). The cultural conflict in those books is the struggle between China and Tibet, a topic of personal significance for me as a Buddhist.

Finishing those, I moved on to his Bone Rattler series. The cultural conflict there is between that of the peoples of the new world (the Native-Americans and the European colonists who are in the process of transforming from Europeans into Americans) and the Europeans who exploit and manipulate the Native-Americans and American colonists.

As Robert Ludlum said in a Writer’s Digest article, “I think arresting fiction is written out of a sense of outrage.” That outrage is certainly there for Pattison in the Chinese/Tibetan conflict, in the pre-Revolutionary War America, and in the post-apocalyptic world of his newest novel, Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America.

However, for Pattison, this outrage is not the “thing” itself; it is merely the context. The “thing” itself is the mystery that must be solved within this context.

Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America

The cultural collision in Ashes of the Earth is on multiple levels. The most obvious is between the memories of the pre-apocalyptic world and the reality of a post-apocalyptic one. Another is between one outpost of survivors and the outcasts from that group. There are other cultural conflicts, but I will leave those for you to discover.

At first, an apocalyptic world novel might seem like a profound departure for such an established author. It’s not. Compare Pattison’s Ashes of the Earth to any of John Christopher’s post-apocalyptic world novels.

(John Christopher is a pseudonym of Samuel Youd. For a great article on his novels see www.colinbrockhurst.co.uk/the-shattered-worlds-of-john-christopher/422/. In the late 60s I read all of Youd’s John Christopher novels. I recommend them highly.)

The stakes are completely different for the two authors. For Christopher, the underlying theme is survival in a world of anarchy–that’s what’s at stake. For Pattison, survival is just the context, the mystery is the game.

Pattison’s Sleuths

Typically, Pattison’s sleuths all have a foot in both sides of the cultural conflict. Often he is a fallen and outcast hero of the culture of oppression who defends the oppressed culture as a side effect of his sleuthing. Here, too, is a feature of Pattison’s novels that set them apart from many mysteries.

Over the course of each series, and to a certain extent within each book, the hero is experiencing his own character arc, a change of perspective, loyalties, belief systems, and sense of purpose. This arc is built into the nature of the character himself. It is a journey of self-discovery for the sleuth. I find this aspect of Pattison’s novels particulary rewarding as a reader. Pattison’s sleuths are not static, two-dimensional characters. This makes for considerable interest and tension. Not only is there a crime to be solved, but the hero himself is a mystery, to us and to himself.

When I look back over the novels of Pattison that I’ve read, I remember many of the characters vividly, not just his heroes. This is not always the case with an author. Just taking the two authors mentioned above, both favorites of mine, Christopher and Ludlum, aside from the main character how many of their other characters do I remember? Not all that many. In Pattison’s novels, I remember quite a few.

A venerable tradition is maintained

Above all, Pattison’s books are mysteries–not political fiction, not intrigue, not thrillers, not sci-fi (although all those elements may be there), but mysteries. There is a crime to be solved. We try to solve it. The sleuth solves it and explains it. What more could a mystery junkie ask?

I highly recommend Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America. Once you read it, I suspect you’ll go back and read more of his novels.

Bornean orangutan (male) “Rango” Age 36. The only great ape from Asia, orangutans are among the most endangered animals on earth.

What a privilege: a private tour by the person I’m convinced is the world’s best docent of the zoo rated #1 in the United States by Parent’s Magazine. That zoo and that docent (Jane Rubin) are right here in Tampa Bay, at the Lowry Park Zoo (www.lowryparkzoo.com), 1101 W. Sligh Ave., Tampa, FL 33604, 813-935-8552.

As was mentioned in The Jackson, Mississippi, Zoo, where my cousin, Donna, is the veterinary technician, zoos have come a long, long, long way from the dismal, depressing dungeons of my youth.

Today’s zoo keepers are animal activists and preservationists whose purpose extends way beyond just keeping animals in captivity for the entertainment of human animals.

For instance, take a look at the Commitment to Conservation page of the Lowry Park Zoo’s website. This is where the zoo’s efforts to continually look “for ways to enhance the animals’ lives through behavioral enrichment, operant conditioning and exhibit improvements” are discussed. Also described are their significant contributions to animal conservation.

On that page are links to four important subpages:

• Conservation In The Zoo
• Conservation Regionally
• Conservation Around The World
• Conservation Recycling Program

On the first of those pages, Conservation in the Zoo, we learn of the zoo’s three goals of education, conservation and research. Their mission is to “Connect People with the Living Earth.”

They are a member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) which conserves wildlife through education, research, captive breeding for reintroduction, and fund-raising to support field conservation.

There are 40 animals at the Lowry Park Zoo that are part of the AZA Species Survival Plan® (SSP) program–they are listed on the Lowry Park Zoo’s Conservation In The Zoo page.

There’s so much to recommend this Tampa attraction. Anyone coming to a convention in Tampa should take an afternoon or morning and go. Any parent or grandparent living in the area should buy passes and spend time with their children and grandchildren there. I saw many photographers there and I learned that often they buy year passes and spend many hours there photographing the animals. For the kids, there’s a few rides, of course, but the main attraction are the animals.

All the pictures in this post were taken at the Lowry Park Zoo and Jane helped me identify the animals after I’d edited the pictures so I’d be sure to get everything properly labeled. (Any errors are mine!)

“Rango,” pictured at the beginning of the post is perhaps my favorite animal there; I relate to his sense of style. I learned from Jane that every year at holiday time, the volunteers bring the animals presents which the animals love to open. I’ll have to think of a suitable gift for Rango.

Support wildlife preservation and have a good time doing it: go to the Lowry Park Zoo.

Bornean orangutan (female) “Josie” age 25 & daughter, “Hadiah” age 5	Chimpanzee (female) “Rukiyah”
Colobus monkey – Angola	Siamang : female “Haddie” & male “Cyrus” & baby “Malu.”

Ringtailed lemur – Madagascar	Golden lion tamarin (Brazil)
Bolivian grey titi monkeys female “Leap” & male “Cleve”	Yellow-footed rock wallaby
emu	petting zoo goat
African penguin feeding session	Waterbuck (safari ride)

meerkat sentinel

Grevy’s zebra & white rhino	African elephant & Hartman mountain zebra
Reticulated giraffe male “Billy Bob” & Rothschild’s giraffe male “Randle”	Shoebill stork male “Mr. Zero”
Cheetah brothers “Chaka” & “Gaheeji”	Pygmy hippo Mother “ZzaZza” & daughter “Anakiya”
Maribou stork – sunning	Okapi female “Betty.” Okapis live only in the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and are so elusive that they only became known to the European world in 1901. It is the giraffes’ only relative.
Saddlebilled stork	Shoebill stork female “Binti” Hatched at Lowry Park Zoo 12/26/09. Binti is the ONLY shoebill hatched and reared by parents (without incubation or feeding intervention) anywhere in captivity in any accredited zoo.

Male giraffes (safari ride) “TangaTanga,” “Timmy” & “Benwa”

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. Therein lies a tale:

Back in 1991, as usual, I was supplementing my income as a college prof by moonlighting as a church musician, playing organ and conducting a volunteer choir. That particular year, I happened to put on a variety show with the choir, doing a number of sets of pop tunes from different decades and different styles, ending with a political set that concluded with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” complete with the church’s Boy Scout troop marching in with the American flag, which of course got the audience on its feet and insured a huge round of applause. Pure cornball!

Well, as chance would have it, the Executive Producer of the Super Bowl Pregame Show was in the audience because he was, completely unbeknownst to me, a member of that parish. Following the concert, he came up to me and said words to the effect of, “I’ve got a proposition for you…”

It seemed that the coming year’s Pregame Show (Super Bowl XXVI Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1992) showcased local Minnesota youth including the Metropolitan Boys Choir, the Twin Cities Youth Symphonies, and four local marching bands. He needed a musical arrangement that accommodated all of them at one time! He asked if I’d be the Music Director for that show, writing that arrangement as well as writing and recording the arrangements for the other acts in the show and supervising a bunch of production details associated with the game.

I said, “Sure!” Now, please understand. Although I have done a lot of commercial writing and arranging, I consider myself primarily a classical musician, with a special emphasis in church music, since most of my publications are in that area and my major instrument was pipe organ.

And that’s the point of the whole story: not in a million, million years would I ever have even considered that–starting with the 1992 game and continuing through Super Bowl XXXVI Pregame Show, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2002, for a total of 10 shows–I would be involved in pro athletic entertainment. Never! But, it happened, completely out of the blue.

But, when I look back, I realize that almost everything that has happened to me, good and bad, but especially good, was a surprise. Not just the Super Bowl gig, but new friends, new opportunities, new insights, new jobs…all surprises, all unsought.

Of course, I had to have done the work to have created the conditions that made those surprises even possible. For instance, it’s unlikely that I’ll be “surprised” to be asked to be a ballet dancer for a dance troop…unless they need someone in an elephant costume! My dietary habits and lack of exercise pretty well preclude that possibility.

And, once the opportunity arose, and I said Yes to the opportunity, I needed to have busted butt to earn being asked back year after year. (Every year that I was rehired, I was always, truthfully, surprised; every year I figured that that was the last time.)

A friend has pointed out that Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, German field marshal at the start of the First World War, said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” You have to plan, you have to prepare, but when you make contact with life, it all changes and it’s all a surprise.

And, as another general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

This is not just true in warfare, it’s also true in music: you practice, practice, practice…but, then you go out on stage and forget about all that. You just play.

Regardless what you think is going to happen, what happens and how it happens and when it happens, is always a surprise and different than you’d ever anticipated.

That’s a relief isn’t it? No amount of straining is going to “make” things happen. What happens is what happens and past a certain point, it’s out of your hands.

Relax and enjoy life’s surprises.

1. The Skull Mantra (1999)
2. Water Touching Stone (2001)
3. Bone Mountain (2002)
4. Beautiful Ghosts (2004)
5. Prayer of the Dragon (2007)
6. The Lord of Death (2009) [Wikipedia]

Just goes to prove “there’s no accountin’ far taste” (to be spoken in the Ozark accent into which I was born; down there, “for” rhymes with “far”).
 
I love the series and highly recommend it. It fits, squarely, within the niche defined in Mystery Series Set in Foreign Lands with one additional quirk: the protagonist is Han Chinese, a disgraced inspector from Beijing who, before he was sent to a labor camp in Tibet, was a highly placed political person in the government.
 
Lest one become too condescending toward China’s Tibetan policy, I think it’s good to remember that…

• our own country’s conquering, killing, subjugation, disenfranchisement, and internment in reservations of the native people of this land has been quite a bit less than humane–nor is there any sign that we intend to make any reparations or amends to them;
• ditto our treatment of the natives of Africa who were enslaved on American soil;
• theocracies of any sort–even Buddhist–are a disaster (even governments too much in the sway of any one religion, such as in Sri Lanka, can become dangerous);
• the media, including fiction but most certainly “news,” is never free from bias, so unless one is actually in the location in question, there is no way to know the real story and most historical theory would say that even then, one cannot know the whole, unbiased story, because one can only view circumstances from a single point in space and time and through a single personal bias;
• and, if one goes back into history to justify a point of view, it is always possible to go back even farther in time and support an opposing point of view–it is best to confront reality solely on the basis of the current situation.

That said…the Tibetan context of Pattison’s novels makes the heart break.
 
Inspector Shan’s heart broke too and he became acculturated to the Tibetan Buddhist sensibility through his contact with lamas in prison camp and, after his release, to the wider Tibetan society.
 
It’s worth taking a look at the Wikipedia article on acculturation. The examples given in the article are of native peoples being exposed to outside culture and gradually adopting and integrating their customs into their own. However, acculturation works both ways.
 
It happened when the Romans brought Greek slaves to teach their young; Greek thought and ideals infiltrated Roman culture. It happened when African slaves were brought to America; “southern cooking” is really African-American cooking and jazz and rock arise from African-American music. It happens time after time throughout history, the “conquering” force always seems to, eventually, absorb and “become” the very thing it conquers.
 
Personified by Inspector Shan, I think that is what Pattison’s books hold out as the eventual solution to the Tibetan future, that the acculturation will eventually go both ways. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the Qing dynasty became Buddhist with a Tibetan lama as advisor to the Emperor. Might not that be the model for a possible future?

The Leroy Selmon Crosstown Expressway (map) is a toll road that stretches from Gandy Blvd., on the lower peninsula of Tampa, just north of MacDill Air Force Base, across the top of Hillsborough Bay, on to Brandon, a bedroom community to the southeast of Tampa.

The purpose of the Crosstown Expressway, which was ridiculed when it was first built as going “from nowhere to nowhere,” is to get you from point A to point B as quickly as possible. It’s also a thing of beauty, I think, with its long swooping concrete curves that always make me think of those old, old, old Flash Gordon movies from the 30s, with Planet Mongo and Ming the Merciless.

But, even better are the beauties that the Crosstown gives you the opportunity to see from its elevated position, especially along the top of Hillsborough Bay.

From the Crosstown you can see The Big Boats in drydock. It’s amazing. I wish the designers of the Crosstown had realized the beauty they were spanning and had built in some Scenic Pulloffs from which people could pause to appreciate what they’re zipping across.

I’m really not sure which of the following shipyards I’m looking at or are pictured in this post–International Ship Repair & Marine Services, Inc. (Google place page), Tampa Ship, LLC (Google place page), or Gulf Marine Repair Corporation (Google place page)–but it doesn’t much matter; the visuals are magnificent.

There’s something about seeing such huge machines cradled within the embrace of even larger machines that’s awe inspiring in a way that’s not unlike being in a massive cathedral. One is dwarfed by something bigger than oneself.

A little farther downtown, not quite visible from the Crosstown, is the Tampa Port Authority. That website has a great aerial photo in its header. I recommend going there just for that, but there’s plenty of other goodies there, too.

A port I remember well from my childhood which is still an important shipbuilding port is Pascagoula, Mississippi (also see Port of Pascagoula). I’ve never been quite sure what there is I like so much about Pascagoula. Part of it’s simply the sound of the word and how it feels in my mouth when I say it. The other part, maybe, is its history of legendary UFO sightings (see MUFON). It could be the many quiet marinas with the gentle sounds they make. Probably, it’s also the memories of fishing there with my father.

I know the Pascagoula shipyards are still quite active and build military ships, but I don’t know–and couldn’t quite suss out from online material–if the Tampa shipyards still is a boat building center. At one time is was, but I seem to remember that that function diminished with time, leaving only the cruise ships and boat repair businesses.

Regardless, the views from the Crosstown are magnificent. I highly recommend that ride from “nowhere to nowhere.”

amusements and pastimes

There’s an interesting getaway a leisurely five hour drive from Tampa: Jeckll Island, Georgia (www.jekyllisland.com).

The History of Jeckll Island page of the above website gives an encapsulated account of its history:

“In 1886, Jekyll Island was purchased to become an exclusive winter retreat for America’s most elite families, known as the Jekyll Island Club. For more than half a century, the nation’s leading families, including the Rockefellers, Morgans, Pulitzers, and Goulds, came to Jekyll Island ‘to secure an escape.’”

Jeckll Island Hotel Club exteriors

As with many of the pleasures one discovers in life, a trip to Jeckll Island would never have been something I would have sought out on my own initiative; rather, I went there because of an external event–the wedding of my son!

My son and his fiancé–now his wife–decided to have a small, “destination wedding.”

I’d never heard that term before. But, now that I’ve learned about it, I must say I’m taken with the idea. The couple and those invited to the wedding go to the destination and rent rooms through the night of the wedding. The wedding takes place on the grounds of the destination and included in the price of the event are things like the officiant, the musician, the photographer, the wedding dinner, etc. Then, the day following the wedding, the guests return home and the couple stays at the destination for their honeymoon.

Such a lovely idea. And in this case, this particular destination was such a lovely place, a place I would never have come to otherwise.

The guests and bride and groom stayed at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel (www.jekyllclub.com)–either the main building or one of the “cottages,” which are the former residences of people who used to winter there and who originally bought the island, people such as the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Pulitzers. Humble folk. Just about as humble as their three storey “cottages.”

Jeckll Island Hotel interiors

All the pictures in this post are of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel buildings and grounds.

There are other, quite good, less expensive places to stay on the island, but the Jekyll Island Club Hotel was less expensive than I thought it would be. Actually, it was less than some hotels on St. Pete Beach. So, if you’re only going for a couple nights, as I was, it doesn’t break the bank. For a very nice two days within a short day’s drive from Tampa, I really do recommend Jeckll Island, Georgia, and the other neighboring Golden Isles of Georgia (St. Simons Island, Brunswick, and Sea Island–see Brunswick and the Golden Isles of Georgia).

Jeckll Island Hotel dock

One last suggestion: when you visit the Jeckll Island Club Hotel, take time to visit its bookstore. Allow at least an hour to browse its many rooms, each dedicated to a specific theme related to the Georgia islands. My favorite (you can tell by checking my credit card statement for that visit) was the cookbook room, with many cookbooks relating to the Atlantic barrier islands cooking history.

Jeckll Island bookstore

There are two cookbooks in particular I’d like to mention. One is Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way: Smokin’ Joe Butter Beans, Ol’ ‘Fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-Bush Blackberry Dumpling, and Other Sea Island Favorites. The other is Cornbread Nation 5: The Best of Southern Food Writing.

Cornbread Nation is the most recent in a series of Best of Southern Food Writing volumes. That title is obviously carefully chosen. It’s the quality of the writing, not just the recipes, that is the appeal of the series.

trees and moss

Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way is, of course, about the cooking of the Gullah region (the coast of South Carolina and Georgia), home to the Gullah who…

” are known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African-American community in the United States. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and significant influences from African languages in grammar and sentence structure. The Gullah language is related to Jamaican Creole, Barbadian Dialect, and the Krio language of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Gullah storytelling, cuisine, music, folk beliefs, crafts, farming and fishing traditions, all exhibit strong influences from West and Central African cultures.” [ref]

To say more about the Gullah would require another whole post. There is also an incredibly rich and beautiful Gullah musical tradition that would require yet another whole post! So, I’ll leave you with these five links that interested me in a Google search of Gullah.

• Gullah Language & Culture
• The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection
• Hilton Head Island Gullah Celebration
• Gullah Festival
• Gullah Gourmet

Also…all best wishes to my son and daughter-in-law. May you have many, many happy years together!

[Disclaimer: if you buy something, like the books above, through my Amazon.com links, I receive a teeny-weenie commission from Amazon. It really is miniscule. It doesn't increase the price of the item in any way. So, if you'd be willing to buy something through my Amazon links, I might be able to afford a second cup of coffee some morning! I make this disclaimer because we are now required to by law, so please consider things thoroughly disclaimed.]

If you enjoy travel to foreign lands and if you enjoy mystery suspense series with a strong, memorable protagonist, then we share the love of a special niche in escapist fiction.

I’m sure there are more such series, but there are four authors’ series that I know of.

James Church‘s novels, featuring an Inspector O of Pyongyang, North Korea. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely, inhospitable setting for a story and likable protagonist, but Church makes it work, fabulously. I guarantee you’ll be hooked once you start reading these:

• A corpse in the Koryo (2006)
• Hidden moon : an Inspector O novel (2007)
• Bamboo and blood (2008)

Perhaps my favorite among the authors I know in this niche is John Burdett with his Bangkok series, featuring a continuing cast of quite varied characters, including the central one, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. What is so intriguing about this series is how completely the characters’ world view is Thai–not at all Western. I really do love this series.

• Bangkok 8: A Novel (2003)
• Bangkok Tattoo (2006)
• Bangkok Haunts (2007)
• The Godfather of Kathmandu (2010)

An earlier novel of his, not part of the series, is The Last Six Million Seconds (1997), that takes place during the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the People’s Republic of China. Good book!

Of course, the widely known Millennium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson, belongs in this niche as well. These may be the most famous novels of this type.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
• The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007)

To my knowledge, there’s no one who wrote mystery series set in foreign lands earlier, than the granddaddy of them all, Martin Cruz Smith and his Inspector Arkady Renko mysteries set in Russia:

• Gorky Park (1981)
• Polar Star (1989)
• Red Square (1992)
• Havana Bay (1999)
• Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
• Stalin’s Ghost (2007)
• Three Stations (2010)

I would love to see Church and Burdett become as widely known as Larsson and Smith; they deserve to be.

I would also love to know of other mystery series set abroad so I can indulge myself in more hours of armchair travel and sleuthing.

There are, of course, many mystery series with European locales…England, France. And, I vaguely remember reading a series of mysteries set in Italy featuring a rather dour, Italian police detective, but I can’t recall the author’s name or any of the titles in the series. But, I was thinking, in this post, of more exotic locations.

If you know of any other (exotic locale) foreign mystery series, please comment, below. (No, Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau does not count!)

I’m surprised there’s not a series set in India…or China…or…

Hilton’s first “song”–age 3

For young (and old) composers, there are no books that really help you understand the process of composing music. I mean that word, “no,” quite literally. There’s not a single book that I know of that really deals with the process.

The books that purport to be about composition are really about music theory, which is the study of the nuts and bolts description of different composers’ music. They are to music composition as a grammar book would be to creative writing. It’s stuff you need to know but it’s definitely stuff to put out of your mind when you’re composing.

Instead of books about composing–since there are none–I’ve found much inspiration and guidance in books about creative writing. There, too, of course, there are books which are more about form than the process, but it seems that some creative writing author/teachers understand well the notion of process.

This post doesn’t really concern the lack of books about the process of composing and it definitely does not concern creative writing. (My only talent, if any, for putting words in a row is simple expository writing such as this blog.) It’s about my hobby: photography.

In middle school, I was in the photography club. I loved all the smells and the darkroom ambiance and the magic of watching a picture come into being in the developing solution (this was way back in Brownie camera days). But, one thing and another and I didn’t keep up with it. Instead I devoted more and more time to music. All my life, I didn’t really have a hobby. Music eclipsed everything.

That was a good thing because it enabled me to have a career in music, something many people would love to have. But now, retired from being a college prof, I’ve had the time to indulge myself in photography, to rediscover the joy of having a hobby! Thankfully, digital photography makes practicing the act a lot less expensive than film days.

(FINALLY…here’s the point of the whole post!) So it was that recently, I asked some friends who are experts in the commercial and academic aspects of Art (note the upper case “A”) for advise about a specific aspect of pictures I’ve taken, what would probably correspond to “voice” in literature or “style” in composition. Well, the answers I got back weren’t answers to my question (except for one gallery owner, whose comments I do appreciate), but were rather dedicated to how bad my photography was. Sort of along the lines of “who do you think you are?”

Well, I pretty much put the camera away for quite a while. Couldn’t even work up the spit to post anything here.

I’m a silent processor; I don’t easily share what’s going through my head with others. But, I finally worked up the courage to discuss what I was experiencing with a good friend and working artist (not an academician) who designs theater and opera sets. I told him what I’d asked the experts and what their answers were. He said, “Hilton, you should have known better!” I don’t know why I hadn’t asked him for an opinion about my photography, but I hadn’t. I guess because he’s not an “authority”–he’s “just” a working artist.

He was absolutely right. I should have known better. Probably the two most lethal fields when it comes to anything creative are the commercial and the academic fields. (And I say that, as a life-long college professor.) “Experts” have probably stifled more creativity than they have ever fostered.

So, I’ve been repairing my enthusiasm for taking pictures and posting them on this blog by composing. I know how composing works. I know that each time you write a piece you have to remember how to compose all over again. Each piece is as hard to write as the first one you ever finished. And, finishing a piece is just the beginning…you have to plunge back in and take it all apart and make it all over again at least once, maybe more than once…it’s as if you don’t know what the first note should have been until you have written the last one.

I’ve also been reading creative writing books again to help in rekindling my creative muse, professionally as a composer and, as an amateur, as a photographer.

One excellent book on creative writing is the old The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It is 100% process oriented. The author’s advise applies equally to writing, composing, photographing, cooking, embroidering, dancing, singing, and weaving or whatever else is someone’s personal medium of expression.

Right now, I’m reading an even more helpful book, one that is helping me in my composition and photography, immensely. It’s Writing Alone and with Others by Pat Schneider. Here’s a couple sample quotes from it. I think you can see how relevant they are.

“Some critics claim that all truly great works of literature are already recognized. What a cynical and small-minded view of the human spirit! In other times and other cultures, art was made for the family: quilts, hand-carved pieces, lullabies, ballads. The audience of that art was intimate…Writing is making art, and the test of its value cannot be given into the hands of either the commercial world or the academy.”

“[quoting Dorothea Brande] ‘It is well to understand as early as possible in one’s writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us…If you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original.’”

“[quoting William Stafford] He said the writer’s job is to abandon his or her work, to allow others to make judgment of its worth, and to go on the the next poem, the next story.”

“If you are to write, you must move out of ‘rented rooms’ in your mind, rooms that you have allowed to belong to someone else.”

“It is more important to ask: Have I gone all the way? Have I told all of the truth that my inner eye sees?”

“…fear had frozen her into a habitual rejection of her own work.”

I should have known better. As a composer, most publishers and almost all my academic colleagues hated my music. But, oddly, the musicians who performed it liked it. Even more important, the people who heard it liked it. Perhaps, most important, I liked it and I definitely enjoyed writing it. So, I should have known better than to worry about what the experts say about anything.

One should just do one’s thing, do it the best one can, keep trying to get better, keep doing it and doing it every day, and trust one’s own judgment more than the judgment of others. And–enjoy the doing of it.