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Roger Simon’s Emet: A Spiritual Thriller
Roger Simon is a retired Hollywood screenwriter and novelist. I’ve read his previous novel, The GOAT, about an older man who makes a deal with the devil and becomes the greatest tennis player of all time. It’s very funny and thought-provoking at the same time.
His recently released book, Emet, is more serious. It’s a thriller/fantasy tale told through the eyes of a rabbi, Benjamin Golub. He lives in Nashville, TN, and is a rabbi for a synagogue there. As a fellow Nashvillian, I really enjoyed Simon’s references to real-life locations in our city, as well as his accurate representation of its culture.
One day in 2023, a tornado rips through Nashville, and Benjamin goes to his synagogue’s storm shelter. Also sheltering with him are his wife, Maya, their tweenage grandson, Menahem (Max), and good friends Ed Ristic and Tamara Klein. Tamara is grieving the death of her 23-year-old niece, Allison, who was brutally murdered while out jogging. She blames herself, because she urged Allison to come visit her in Nashville after a difficult breakup. Ed runs a coffeeshop, The Orphanage, and has befriended Tamara. He also fancies himself as a sculptor.
The morning after the tornado blows through, they go outside to take stock of things. The backyard of the synagogue is a mess of fallen trees and mud. Ed has already been there, shoveling mud away from the back wall, and he has created a big pile of mud that is vaguely humanoid. Ed jokes that he could make a statue out of it. Maya reminds Benjamin that it looks like a statue they saw in Prague of a Golem – a mythical being that was brought to life by a Rabbi Loew around 1600. He took some inanimate materials to fashion a humanoid and engraved the word Emet on its forehead, which means “truth”. The legend is that Rabbi Loew used the Golem to protect the Jews living in Prague from pogroms, but it soon got a mind of its own and ended up causing more harm than good.
Max, who is a mathematical and technological prodigy, is fascinated by the story. He is staying with his grandparents, because he got in trouble in school and was suspended.
He had responded to a teacher asking what his pronouns were with “I identify as a donkey. He/haw.” Some of his classmates laughed, but the teacher didn’t think it was funny, and things went south from there.
Simon, Roger. EMET (pp. 32-33). Green Hills Books. Kindle Edition.
Later that evening, unable to sleep, Benjamin gets up and goes out to look at the pile of mud Ed made. You can guess what he does next: he takes a stick and engraves Emet where it looks like a forehead is.
To continue reading my review, click here.
George Schuyler’s Black No More
Imagine a black scientist discovered a way to turn black people into white people. What would happen to American society? That is the premise of George Schuyler’s 1931 novel, Black No More. It is very funny and very disturbing at the same time, portraying the extreme racism of early 20th century America in all its horror and absurdity.
To continue reading my review, click here.
Happy 25th Birthday, Burning Shed!
This month, (almost) unbelievably, marks 25 years of Burning Shed.
We’d like to issue a heartfelt thank you for your support over the many years and provide some insight into the company and what our plans are for this anniversary year.
‘The Shed’ emerged out of an idea Tim Bowness had for an idealistic online / on-demand label. Peter Chilvers – one of Tim’s musical partners – was experienced in the then mysterious world of e-commerce. Pete Morgan, the final piece of the Burning Shed jigsaw, was running Noisebox, a record label and duplication company (that dealt with releases by Tim and Steven Wilson’s band No-Man).
Over several intense gatherings (fuelled by eggs, chips, beans and the milkiest of coffees), a plan was hatched. After six months of trying to convince a bank that the notion of selling CDs from a website wasn’t witchcraft, that plan was in motion.
Tim brought in the music, Peter created the coding and Pete ‘The Morganiser’ took charge of logistics.
Initially, the idea was to issue elegantly packaged, cost-effective CDR releases – designed by Carl Glover – that allowed artists to experiment and, crucially, generate a little income from their endeavours.
Luckily, the first releases – including albums by No-Man, Bass Communion, Roger Eno and Hugh Hopper – proved to be more successful than anticipated and Burning Shed rapidly evolved. Soon the CDRs became CDs and via word of mouth the company was hosting official stores for artists and labels including Robert Fripp / King Crimson, Stewart & Gaskin / Hatfield & The North, Jethro Tull, XTC, Kscope Records and many others (including, of course, No-Man and Porcupine Tree).
Peter Chilvers left in 2008 to work with Brian Eno, but Tim and Pete persisted, building the company up. 25 years on, the Shed is driven by the same instincts as it was at the very beginning.
As a “run by artists for artists” company, we try and ensure that the musicians and labels we deal with receive as much money as they can and that deals and accounting are transparent. There are no hidden costs or binding contracts. The idea has always been to release and help globally distribute great music at reasonable prices in the best way possible (to make sure it arrives in perfect condition and on time).
To celebrate our 25th anniversary, from April until next March we’ll be bringing you special releases, merchandise and giveaways including more raffle winners each month.
We’re also putting on a number of events throughout the year, starting with three co-headline gigs by Tim Bowness with Butterfly Mind plus Bruce Soord & Jon Sykes (The Pineapple Thief):
Sun 24 May – Liverpool, Philharmonic Music Room
Fri 29 May – Bath Fringe Festival at Rondo Theatre
Sat 20 June – London, The 100 Club
Ticket links are available via https://timbowness.co.uk/live/
Looking forward, we’re in a much more complicated world. When we started, it was relatively easy. Shipping involved a jiffy bag, a label and a stamp. Selling online is now more complex, with electronic customs declarations, tariffs, Brexit, GPSR, GDPR, etc etc. From operating out of the corner of Pete’s office at Noisebox, we now have a warehouse and a truly superb team of people making sure everything runs smoothly.
None of this would have been possible without the support of all the artists and labels we have worked with over the years. Most importantly, it would not have worked without you, our customers.
We know there are many other places to buy music from, so that makes it all the more special that you continue to order from us. Some of you have been with us since the very beginning, some of you have just found us. We are extremely grateful to every one of you, old and new.
Thank you for supporting what we do.
Here’s to the next 25 years!
Tim and Pete
Crockett White’s West End: All The King’s Men, updated
I have lived in Nashville, TN, practically all of my life. My parents moved here from Milwaukee, WI, when I was less than a year old. My father was hired in 1961 by Vanderbilt University to start up its Materials Science Department in the Engineering School. Even though I could consider myself a “native” Nashvillian (especially when you take into account the thousands of California refugees that have moved here recently), I have never felt like I am truly am one. It’s a cliche that Nashville is a “big city with a small town feel”, but it’s true. There’s a relatively small circle of everyone who’s anyone, and they all know each other. Still, I managed to keep up with local politics and society gossip through reading the two newspapers, The Tennessean and The Nashville Banner.
Crockett White is a former reporter for The Tennessean, and he obviously spent his career learning all about Nashville’s prominent families’ skeletons in their closets. He utilized that inside knowledge to write West End, a thinly-veiled fictional account of John Jay Hooker’s run for senate in the early 70s. Hooker was a gifted politician who truly had charisma. That word gets thrown around a lot, but very few humans possess it. Hooker had it – even his political opponents acknowledged his gift for connecting with and inspiring practically every person he came in contact with.
To continue reading, click here.
The Branford Marsalis Quartet in Concert: Four Masters Playin’ Tunes
Hitting the St. Cecilia Music Center stage 20 years on from his last visit (and 40 years on from when I first heard him live with his brother Wynton, then with Sting), sax legend Branford Marsalis seemed relieved to have safely made it to Grand Rapids, just one night after two shows further north in snowbound Traverse City. (“Turned right at Cadillac and — whoa!! Where’s Santa?!?”)
But any fear that Marsalis’ tight quartet had been shaken by their brush with a spring blizzard soon vanished; loose and comfortable as their leader teased drummer Justin Faulkner about being the “birthday boy”, they were also focused and ready to play. With a flourish, pianist Joey Calderazzo launched into his postbop workout “The Mighty Sword” — and instantly, the band was in the moment, bringing the sold-out audience with them. Off the knotty head statement, Calderazzo built a two-handed solo to a simmering climax (both his legs were moving, too) that Branford took higher with volcanic soprano licks; meanwhile bassist Eric Revis pushed the pulse onward as Faulkner rolled and tumbled around and across his kit. On the edge of fully free expression, yet always locked into the underlying groove and listening hard to each other, the Quartet’s interplay was riveting and undeniable.
Keith Jarrett’s “‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” was up next. A funky highlight of Jarrett’s 1974 album Belonging (which the Quartet covered in full last year for Blue Note), it brought out a rambunctious streak in Branford, progressing from rhythmic subtones to frenetic sheets of sound; Calderazzo answered with deft, deeply swinging gospel. Which then dramatically transitioned into the rich lyricism of his “Conversation in the Ruins”, as both he and Marsalis took wing above Revis and Faulkner’s subdued, flickering rhythms.
Then, the history lesson. With Branford namechecking songwriter Fred Fisher (born Alfred Breitenbach in Germany before he emigrated to the USA), the Quartet timeslipped back to the primal years of jazz with “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears” (made famous by bandleader Paul Whiteman with Bix Beiderbeicke on cornet and Bing Crosby singing). Everyone soloed to powerful effect — Marsalis crooning on soprano, Revis gracefully, purposefully walking the bass, Faulkner delighting with a dynamic feast of accents and colors. It was only later that I realized: as bland, as polite – even as patronizing – as this music seems in retrospect, 100 years ago, it was on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Why not take it out for a spin today and see what happens?
“Why not?” turned out to be the throughline of everything the Marsalis Quartet did onstage, always leavened with affection for and attention to the music’s potential and each other. As the night went on, the crowd tuned into it, too: how Jarrett’s melancholic “Blossom” was elevated by Rives’ rhapsodic feature and Calderazzo and Branford’s insistent quotes from “Happy Birthday to You” (said one-upmanship bringing hysterical guffaws from Faulkner); how, nudged by the group’s thoughtful probing, Jimmy McHugh’s “On the Sunny Side of the Street” morphed from a hesitation shuffle through stop time to flat-out rock and back again.
And then, coming to an impasse onstage, Marsalis and Calderazzo asked the audience for multiple shows of hands : “Monk or Ellington?” (Branford after that vote: “Ellington wins. Ellington always wins.”) “Up or down?” (Up.) Which yielded a loping, speedy “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” as the last tune — and, announced as for the benefit of the “young musicians” from local high schools in the audience, a downtempo take on the same tune as the encore! Both ways, Branford smoked, Calderazzo swung, Rives flowed — but each drew on varying parts of their vocabulary, to vastly different effect. Though working in the same vein, Faulkner well and truly went to town throughout; his creatively minimalist solo choruses for the encore (first brushes on snare with quarter-note kicks, then entirely on floor tom, ranging from warm caresses to rim cracks to meaty thuds) proved an enticing riot of colors and syncopations. The standing ovations that followed each version were both earned and inevitable.
This lineup of the Branford Marsalis Quartet has worked together for more than a decade. As friend and fellow blogger Cedric Hendrix has observed, that’s rare in jazz circles; the consistent result, whether on record or live, is spectacular internal chemistry – which in turn provides extraordinary opportunities for the music to truly breathe, scaling ever-increasing heights of freshness, invention and resonance. To witness all that, generated by four masters at play, bringing a century’s worth of music to spectacular, technicolor life — well, it’s an experience I’m glad I shared with 600 + others last night!
— Rick Krueger
George Eliot’s Adam Bede: Love Conquers All (except Class)
Last year I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch and very much enjoyed it. It has a deserved reputation of being one of the greatest English novels ever written. So, I decided to start at the beginning of Eliot’s career and read her first novel, Adam Bede. It’s not as good as Middlemarch – very few novels are – but it is quite entertaining in its depiction of English rural life at the turn of the nineteenth century.
To continue reading this review, click here.
Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here
The English Department at the school where I teach has a Writer In Residence every year: an author spends 3 – 4 days guest teaching English classes and then speaking to the upper school students at an assembly. This year’s writer was Kevin Wilson, a literature professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN and author of several bestsellers, including The Family Fang and Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine.
In his talk at the assembly, Wilson spoke of his terror of public speaking and how difficult his adolescence was due to his having Tourette’s Syndrome and social awkwardness. However, he managed to turn these personal obstacles into one of the most entertaining and inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard. He had everyone in the auditorium laughing hysterically one moment and wiping away tears the next. When I got home, I told my wife about how great Wilson was, and she said she thought she had recently bought a book of his. Sure enough, she Nothing to See Here in her stack of books to read; she had picked it up on the recommendation of her brother, who raved about Wilson.
Which is a long way of explaining how I ended up reading (and loving) a book I probably never would have been aware of. Readers of this blog have probably figured out that my tastes lean to nonfiction (history, science and technology), mysteries, and classics (especially Victorian literature). I am grateful that a confluence of events led me to Kevin Wilson’s work.
Nothing to See Here is told through the eyes of Lillian Breaker, a young woman who is a cashier at a small-town grocery store in Tennessee. She is very bright, but due to several circumstances beyond her control, she is at loose ends – living in her mother’s attic, smoking pot, and generally wasting her life. Her mother doesn’t really care about Lillian, having a succession of boyfriends, and living from paycheck to paycheck.
To read the rest of my review, click here.
R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis: A Descent Into Hell
What if “Magick” was an accredited science with the most prestigious universities offering courses of study in it? What if Dante, Orpheus, Virgil, et al. really did descend to Hell, and their writings were nonfiction accounts of their experiences? What if T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland was a travelogue of a real place? Those are the assumptions behind Rebecca Kuang’s enormously entertaining novel, Katabasis.
Cambridge University’s most renowned professor of magick, Jacob Grimes, has died accidentally in a spell gone horribly awry. His two most promising and dedicated graduate students, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, decide to go to Hell to bring him back. Unbeknownst to each other, they each consider themselves responsible for Professor Grimes’ death. On earth, they have been bitter rivals for Grimes’ attention and favor. Down below, they have to figure out how to work together as they traverse the eight courts of Hell. Based on my description, I admit Katabasis sounds like a young adult fantasy novel. However, it is definitely written for an adult audience, and Kuang’s story gets very dark, very fast.
To read my full review, click here.
Best Albums, Counting Back from 2026
A former student, Chuck, just posted his favorite albums from 2001. I must admit, of his list, I only knew one of the albums, Dave Matthews Band’s EVERYDAY. Inspired by Chuck, though, I decided to look back over the years from this year. Here’s what I found. Let me know what I’m missing.
Best Albums, 2021–Five Years Ago
Frost, Day and Age
Transatlantic, The Absolute Universe
Big Big Train, Common Ground
Steve Hackett, Surrender of Silence
Best Albums, 2016–Ten Years Ago
Pineapple Thief, Your Wilderness
Steven Wilson, 4 ½
Iamthemorning, Lighthouse
Marillion, FEAR
Kansas, The Prelude Implicit
Riverside, Eye of the Soundscape
Frost, Falling Satellites
Best Albums, 2011–Fifteen Years Ago
Steven Wilson, Grace for Drowning
Yes, Fly From Here
Airbag, All Rights Removed
Porcupine Tree, Anesthetize
Wobbler, Rites at Dawn
Riverside, Memories in My Head
Cosmograf, When Age has done Its Duty
Neal Morse, Testimony Two
Best Albums, 2006–Twenty Years Ago
David Gilmour, On an Island
Frost, Milliontown
Pure Reason Revolution, The Dark Third
Porcupine Tree, Arriving Somewhere
The Tangent, A Place in the Queue
Tool, 10,000 Days
Best Albums 2001–Twenty-five Years Ago
Tool, Lateralus
Muse, Origin of Symmetry
Dave Matthews Band, Everyday
Yes, Magnification
Radiohead, Amnesiac
Transatlantic, Bridge Across Forever
Marillion, Anoraknophobia
Best Albums, 1996–Thirty Years Ago
Flower Kings, Retropolis
Rush, Test for Echo
Porcupine Tree, Signify
Yes, Keys to Ascension
Spock’s Beard, Beware of Darkness
Stone Temple Pilots, Tiny Music
Dave Matthews Band, Crash
Best Albums, 1991–Thirty-five Years Ago
Talk Talk, Laughing Stock
Marillion, Holidays in Eden
Live, Mental Jewelry
My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
Pearl Jam, 10
Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend
U2, Actung Baby
Best Albums, 1986–Forty Years Ago
XTC, Skylarking
Talk Talk, The Colour of Spring
Peter Gabriel, So
The Smiths, The Queen is Dead
Spirit of Cecilia 
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