Dark and Light

A friend recently reminded me that I have neglected the BLOG; this will be a feeble attempt to get "back on track." A recent trip to a local coffee shop found me looking at the bookshelves and other shelving units created by a local carpenter/log cabin builder, Mike Falls. My question was what are they for, besides backpacks and magazines & books? Are the books borrowable? Yes, and so my eye landed on a volume of stories by the genius of crime fiction, Elmore Leonard. A huge successor to the likes of Raymond Chandler this man takes it to the dark side of life, in the terrain of cops and criminals and where they often intermix.

His writing is excellent and it is tempting to me to deviate from my usual reading preferences and go on the dark side with him. Years ago when one of my sons was beaten and arrested by the Mpls. police for being involved with a political demonstration I got a glimpse of an inner city city hall/police dept. milieu, where police officers and thugs look alike, and where there is a feeling of fear about what is going on. And this in a city where the mayor was supposedly a progressive democrat, and the police chief an intellectual.

How different is a saint like Rabindranath Tagore's interest in the Jiban-debata and the likes of seeming opposites and the fiction of Elmore Leonard? Tagore: "The poet who takes up all the good and bad in me, all my constituent parts, the favourable and the unfavourable alike, to go on creating my life - it is he that in my poetry I call Jiban-debata." I suggest a walk on the wild side with both of these authors.