Last night's blog (July 22)

Good morning. This is my blog for yesterday, July 22. I was too often distracted to ever get it done. Night came, and I went to bed finally.

This blog was meant to be entitled, "Not a review of The Witch of Hebron."

James Howard  Kunstler is a fairly well known figure in the USA, due to his having established himself as an urban critic and assessor of our recent culture.  I respect him for those things and could not agree more with him.  I too loathe and fear those giant figures in baby pants, backwards caps, piercings, and tattoos. Why on earth are they out there on the streets?  We need nothing more to symbolize and illustrate our nation's plunge into cultural darkness, unless it were the  tattooed, pierced, skeleton-thin or muffin-topped females of the species. I am with you, Mr Kunstler.

Jim Kunstler hails from a lake shore just north of Saratoga Springs, NY.  Strangely enough for this little Tex-Mex border denizen, I am fairly familiar with the area thanks to  my sister no.3's having dutifully followed her husband home to his roots some 40-odd years ago. Over these years we have all visited northern NY state many times, and have come to love it. And we have had opportunity on our own, though not as acutely as those living there, to observe the diresome changes in the cityscape of Saratoga Springs and the wonderful network of small cities and villages in a hundred mile radius of where Kunstler writes about.

This is all to say that, when I read Kunstler's latest effort, The Witch of Hebron, I was quite familiar with all the little places he mentions and all the rivers and scenery and woods and autumnal haunts he writes about.  I was sorry to see that poor old Glens Falls, a small city of some distinction when my sister moved there long ago, is reduced to an abandoned wasteland in the future.

That is because Mr Kunstler is writing about a fictional future set in his home environs.  His whole basis for his latest writings is  on the premise of "The Long Emergency," his name for the period that is coming when the oil plays out for good.  The oil hasn't played out yet, here in 2011, or so they say, --but the Long Emergency is already upon us, in my opinion. The Long Emergency, The Prequel, if you will.

The Witch of Hebron is the second of a series of novels that Mr Kunstler is writing, set in his neighborhood, in some time in the future.  In his world, everything has crashed down and we (the few survivors of us) are doing the best we can with what is left to us.  Trouble is, it's hard to encompass his sweeping vision within the framework of a small novel.  He should have gone for something the size of War and Peace for each of these works (the first was A World Made by Hand) instead of trying to make a best seller of it.

His work is fascinating, to say the least.  In literary quality it is highly uneven.  Mr Kunstler is a wonderful painter, and not strangely, his lyrical descriptive writing is the best of his wordcraft.  In narrative, he is learning. Learning.  He has some wonderful ideas. And some real clunkers.

I have no more space nor time to go into the details at this post. But I will.  In another blog  posted soon. Today is my eldest son's birthday and I have other writing to do. YAZZYBEL