Jamie Lefever

She has just moved into the position of Executive Director of the Clarion County Economic Development  Corp, a spot vacated by Brad Ehrhart who moved on to Portage County, Ohio.  If you want to talk to Jamie, drop in to the CCEDC office at 21 N 6th Avenue, Clarion.

The community foundation has two openings available on the board of directors, and we welcome new interest in becoming a volunteer member of the board.  We meet from four to seven times a year for an hour at 5pm on the third Wednesday of the month.  If you would like to visit to learn more about the foundation, call the board president Jerry Belloit at home (814) 227-2673.  Charles Marlin

For long time fans of Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 will be a delight, all 925 pages.  For readers new to the master, the energy and time needed to finish such a long book may overwhelm them.  He is certainly worth getting to know; and Kafka On The Shore or Norwegian Wood are good places to start.

1Q84 has the swirl of altered realities that is Murakami’s special gift.  His characters are richly textured.  Every detail is meaningful because the reader may need it later.  Deconstruct a scene only to be clueless as to what will happen in the next scene.

Reading Murakami is an active sport in which the reader wins but never finishes ahead of the author.  Charles Marlin

I purchased this product late last winter in an aerosol can which is convenient but you cannot tell how much product you have left.  This season I bought the spray bottle which I rate excellent.

Look for a bright yellow bottle with a blue label.  Don’t trust your loved ones to follow your advice.  Buy the product and hand it to them.  Charles Marlin

For decades I have mildly chided myself for not going beyond one feeble undergraduate attempt to read the Divine Comedy.  After nibbling an hors d’oeuvre here and there in Wilson, I am satisfied to live without making the sacrifice in time and effort to read the old boy directly.

If you are not steeped in background, but still have an interest to learn more about Dante as preparation for starting in on the Divine Comedy, or as a substitute for entering Hell, then this is just the book for you.  You will learn the little that is known about Dante as a person, and the sad state of political affairs in the Italy of his time, and the corrupt involvement of the church in all things that were none of its true mission.  You will learn how Dante treated friends, family, and foes.  There certainly appears to be a lot one can learn from Dante’s writing.

Reading Wilson it is easy to believe he has done his research and given you the clearest possible entry into Dante, but an objective scholar he is not.  He is a giddy cheerleader with large, double pom-poms.  If you like watching cheerleaders, you will not miss his lack of objectivity.

The book has a lively collection of colored illustrations of Dante and the Divine Comedy.  Charles Marlin

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,700 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Pound for pound, Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio: A Life Sacred And Profane, the shipping weight is 2.2 pounds, will give a lover of art more value than the best of fruit cakes or a heavily handicapped Tiffany bobble.  What you don’t know about the painter and what you have yet to learn about viewing his work could fill a book and it has.  This is a biography to keep.  Put it on your e-reader if you are traveling and expect to see his work.

Because it is the Christmas season I selected for illustration The Adoration of the Shepherds and to prove a point.  Look carefully at the painting, then tell me if you see anything false or fanciful.  Describe the faith of the artist; no, not an easy task for anyone but made more likely by Graham-Dixon’s masterful research, interpretation, and speculation.

There is, I am sorry to write, a very big drawback with the book.  The illustrations are far too small and too dark to follow the author as he explains what Caravaggio painted and why.  You will need a companion volume showing the paintings to better advantage to get the full thrust of the scholarship.  Or, turn to the internet for the illustrations.

Whatever you do, make this your Caravaggio Christmas.  Charles Marlin

If you are looking for another detective story of a law enforcement officer, larger than his faults, long on suffering and grief, living with physical pain and age, his life at loose ends, who finds solace in the great outdoors, booze, and sex, then this is the book for you.  If you like the bad guys to be more than criminal, to be steeped in evil, then this is right for you.

You may find the detective’s name dropping tiresome, and his drinking and sexual arousal boring, but every book has drawbacks.  You will enjoy Harrison’s skill in describing the weather and landscape.  He puts the reader where the action is.  Charles Marlin

If the author James Grant was a Japanese citizen, he could be declared a National Living Treasure for his status as guru of bonds and the founding editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.  Alas, he lives in Brooklyn, and we in America have no such honor to bestow on him.  I was fortunate to come upon he and his wife Patricia strolling down a Brooklyn avenue this past Sunday.

“Good afternoon Mr. & Mrs. Grant, how nice to see you out and about.  May I ask an impertinent question?”

Mrs. Grant replys, “Of course you may and I think I know the question.  You want to know how my husband turned a pig’s ear into such a beautiful purse as I now display.”

“No ma’am, I see it is still a pig’s ear; what I want to know is why he bothered with it in the first place.”

The conversation seemed to turn less cordial at this moment, so I made a hasty departure.  The question, however, remains.  What do you expect to find at a pig farm or during the swinish Gilded Age in America?  What do you expect to achieve that evaded John Singer Sargent when he painted a portrait of Thomas B. Reed?

Grant’s Mr. Speaker! The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, The Man Who Broke the Filibuster tries very hard to make him interesting and worthy of our respect.  Charles Marlin

Every time a good book on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker comes out, it renews one’s sense of lose and fear of future loses.  My first book was Christopher Cokinos, Hope Is The Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds in 2000; and then Tim Gallagher, The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 2005: both wonderful books on the “Kints.”  Why be drawn into buying a third book?

The answer is Stephen Lyn Bales’ Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941 is not a rehash, but a fresh approach with new details and areas of interest.  It is as much about Southern history and ecology, and pioneering field research in ornithology as it is about the lost Woodpecker.  It is about James T. Tanner who, without precedent, set a gold standard for such research.  It is about pursuing a nobel project through sacrifice, disappointment, and dogged persistence, without regard for personal gain or comfort.  It is also a great adventure story.

Given the history of our country, it was inevitable we would lose the Woodpecker; and fear should stalk all of us as we lose other bird species.  If we are to save species it must be something every citizen is knowledgeable about, understands the costs, and accepts the sacrifices as necessary for maintaining our respect for life and the planet.  We must understand it is a private concern of each citizen and a public concern at every level of business and government.

May I never hear I have seen a bird now lost to others.  Charles Marlin

In the fall of 1989, friends gave me a copy of Black Cherry Blues as I was leaving a party.  I thought no decisions are good decisions when you are in less than full control of your facilities so I accepted their gift.  I eventually read the book and was beguiled; thinking, this is a writer to follow.

In the years since, I have given away my professional library and most of my leisure library, some were books of supreme quality, all toll beyond a number I care about.  Still on the shelf was Black Cherry Blues.  When I happened upon it, I would think, I need to check on him.

Finally on a slow Sunday morning, I hit on him on the internet.  He has a new one, Feast Day Of Fools, so I ordered.  The old pleasure came back full strength.  He is a ball-buster.  If you don’t know him, you are the loser.

Don’t say you like mysteries if you don’t know James Lee Burke.  Charles Marlin