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Author: James Brush

James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.

Empires of Time

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

Anthony Aveni’s Empires of Time is a fascinating portrait of the rhythms and roles of time-keeping in a variety of cultures including the Aztec, Inca, Maya, and ancient Chinese. This is a thrilling exploration of a topic we all too often don’t bother to consider.

A Walk in the Woods

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson is quite possibly the funniest book I have ever read. Bryson’s opening chapters covering his fear of bears had me laughing so hard, that I actually cried. A must read for not just a great laugh, but an impassioned exploration of our country’s natural wonders.

When I read it, I often found myself moved to hit the local trails for my own walks in the woods.

A Natural State

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

Stephen Harrigan’s A Natural State, a collection of essays originating in Texas Monthly does an exceptional job of taking the reader through the natural wonders of Texas, from the beaches to the deserts, and finally to the Hill Country’s Enchanted Rock.

By the end of the book, I had no other choice than to hop in my own car and hit the Texas highways and rediscover this natural state for myself.

Valis

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

Philip K. Dick’s Valis is at once sublime and unsettling. From the schizophrenic changes from third to first person point of view (“I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity”, the narrator reminds himself as much as the reader) through the brilliant “Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura” that comprise the appendix, we see a work that goes beyond mere science fiction and attempts to wrestle with the insane story of life itself.

This is a novel that seeks no less than the ultimate answers to life’s biggest questions. Philip Dick in attempting to make sense of his own life gives us a work that is at once thrilling, empassioned, beautiful, funny, and sad.

This is truly one of the greatest (and least appreciated) works of American literature. I can’t say it gave me all the answers, but it raised many questions and new ideas as well as inspiring me in my own writing. Isn’t that what great literature is about? Thank you, PKD, wherever you are.

Thousands of Pages of Potter and Loving It

I’ve been putting away one Harry Potter book per film release for the past few years and enjoying each book more than the last. About a month ago, in anticipation of the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I began reading the mammoth tome that describes Harry’s fourth year at Hogwarts. What immediately struck me was the substantially darker tone and the transformation of Dumbledore into a character less like Santa Claus and more like Gandalf. The book was well-done and thankfully (relatively) free of Quidditch. The book, of course, ends dark and the next book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (because this time I couldn’t wait another year or more) picks up right where it left off – Harry’s situation progressing from bad to worse.

I sped through the fifth book enjoying more than anything else the way Rowling grows her characters. The series opens dealing with kids, but by the end of Order of the Phoenix, Harry and company are on the fast road to adulthood, firmly believing they are already there, but still making the kind of rash and impulsive decisions that we all make as teenagers. Of course, none of us have the kinds of problems that Harry has nor the means of solving them. Still this provides a layer of depth to Rowling’s writing that I was not at all expecting when I picked up the first book and read it over the course of several hours on a Thanksgiving afternoon. She does a fine job turning Harry into a confused, angry, and possibly dangerous young man who wants nothing more than to be normal but who must shoulder a burden far beyond what anyone would want a kid to have to handle.

It is not just Harry’s maturation process that makes the series so interesting to me, however, but rather his relationships with and discoveries about the older wizards who seem increasingly human the older Harry gets. This is a natural phenomenon that kids experience as they grow older and their parents, teachers and other adults around them lose some of their grandeur, and once again Rowling handles it well. Especially fine is her portrayal of Severus Snape, the spooky potions professor we all love to hate. This guy clearly despises Harry and never misses an opportunity to viciously run him down, and yet just as Harry and his friends, time and again know he’s surely evil, he does something that saves Harry’s neck and yet still finds time to sneer at Harry just as cruelly as before.

Rowling’s ability to undercut expectations is, for me, a large part of why these books are so fun. The early books are enchanting, mysterious, yet rather predictable. They all end with Dumbledore patiently explaining The Moral of the Story to Harry and what he should have learned, but as Harry and his friends grow up, the universe in which they live expands, becoming increasingly complicated, nuanced, and more dangerous to the point that not even Dumbledore can adequately explain everything to Harry other than Dumbledore’s own mistakes and failures. Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Mrs. Weasely, Hagrid, Harry’s dead father, all of the adults to whom he has looked up through his life in the wizarding world emerge tarnished, slightly smaller, yet infinitely more human. And of course none of them are able to provide all of the advice and answers to the big questions that Harry so desperately wants and needs. Rowling’s ability to capture this painful aspect of growing up so poignantly and believably is, more than anything else, why I immediately began reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as soon as I finished book five.

Switching Crooks

October is often a bleak month starting with OU’s annual defeat of UT. Then it gets worse, usually culminating in Republicans winning a bunch of elections. I’ve been more optimistic, though, since UT beat OU. Now the Astros are in the playoffs. Delay has been indicted. The Bush administration is floundering as it awaits – hopefully – indictments. People are finally waking up to Republican corruption. Could this be the end of evil?!? Could we see a bright new dawn of Democratic corruption? One can only hope…

Friday Afternoon

The weather today is relatively nice, though a bit hot for mid-October. I guess I should get used to that as it seems it’s just going to get hotter as we continue to cook the planet to a nice crisp. Imagine all that Alaskan coastline that could someday be prime property for beach homes…

Still, a round of golf might be in order this weekend, a chance to test out the new putter in the vain hope that my putting problems have all been my old putter and not pilot-error. Taking up golf has been a pleasure and a challenge (and a growing obsession) that I’ve very much enjoyed. I hadn’t ever realized that it’s an insanely mental game. The difficulty is that there’s too much time to think about what you’ve got to do. I wonder if someone were trying to tackle me as I was about to shoot, would I make better shots by just letting my muscles do the work without being second-guessed by my mind? I suppose that’s my favorite thing about golf, other than being outside: it forces me to clear my mind, which of course is very rejuvenating and a fine way to spend a weekend morning.

Watching UT paste Colorado should also be nice, if a bit dull.

Ok, so this is not a Post of Great Significance. It’s mainly an attempt to post via email to see how this goes.

A Great Dog

ZephyrWe lost Zephyr to cancer a month ago today, and that’s kind of what’s on my mind. The house is quieter as our cat and other dog don’t make nearly as much noise since they don’t tend to follow anyone around the way Zephyr did.

We got her 8 years ago at the Town Lake Animal Shelter in Austin, and she proved to be a loyal companion and a wonderful friend. She was a greyhound/whippet mix possessed of the greyhound’s natural friendliness and sensitivity combined with the courage of a whippet. She would actually bark at the doorbell while our purebred greyhound always runs away.

I’ve always felt that one of life’s cruelest injustices is the fact that we live so long while they live such a short time. She may have been “only a dog,” but the heart does not discriminate when a friend is lost. Still, there are so many great memories of hill country hikes and shenanigans around the house that it’s hard not to smile when I think about her.

Coyote Mercury: The Blog

OK. So this is the Coyote Mercury blog, based in Austin, Texas. I don’t yet have a purpose for blogging except that this seems an amusing way for an obsessive writer to have some fun and maybe even pick up a few new readers.

The names of the blog and my main website are derived from a character in my first novel, A Place Without a Postcard. The character is surprisingly enough a coyote named Mercury who may actually be just a plain old dog, or – possibly – God.

Enough for now. I should get back to learning how this blog stuff works.