Monday, April 30, 2018

A post-traumatic test of wills

What today is termed post-traumatic stress disorder was called battle fatigue in World War II and shell shock during and after World War I. Whatever the term, the condition affects those, not necessarily soldiers, who have witnessed more stress or horror than they can cope with emotionally.

Since 1996, Charles Todd (actually the mother and son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd) has been producing a successful series of British mysteries featuring Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard inspector with a serious, if well-hidden, disorder. When he is tired or under stress, he hears the voice of Hamish, a soldier whom Rutledge shot during the war for his failure to obey a direct, if suicidal, order.

In A Test of Wills, the very first book in this series, Rutledge returns to his job at Scotland Yard at the close of the war, but neither he nor his superiors knows if he is up to it. His first case involves two other veterans of that war, a colonel blown off his horse by someone with a shotgun and a captain seen as the most likely suspect. Because Captain Wilton is a national war hero, the Yard very much wants somebody else, anybody else, to be guilty of the crime.

Wilton had been planning to marry Lettice Wood, the ward of Colonel Harris, but on the night before the murder the two men had been heard quarreling. A witness says the argument had resumed the next morning. Other evidence also points to the captain, while there seems to be nobody else with both motive and opportunity.

The novel's title gains multiple meanings as the story unfolds, but firstly the case represents a test of Rutledge's will. Can he discover the truth when those at the center of the case seem determined to hide it from him? Can he build a case that will hold up in court, let alone stand up to the pressure from Scotland Yard? Most of all, can he silence the voice of Hamish long enough to focus his mind on the murder?

Rutledge, as it turns out, is not alone in suffering from shell shock. or its equivalent. A witness, once a prominent citizen and skilled worker, has become an alcoholic since the war. And a little girl who saw the decapitated body of the colonel remains in a state of shock. Rutledge's own experience makes him more willing and able to get more out of these witnesses than other detectives might have been able to do.

I found the novel's ending weak, given my preference for detectives who actually detect the killer rather than just get lucky at the end, but otherwise A Test of Wills is a good start to a good series of mysteries.

Friday, April 27, 2018

The magician's secrets

It was one thing to have spent your life in love with a man who could not return the favor, but it was another thing entirely to love a man you didn’t even know.
Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant

For Sabine, the beautiful magician’s assistant, both of these things turn out to be true. She loved Parsifal, the magician, almost from the time he made her part of his act, and in time he married her. Yet he never loved her in the way he loved Phan, the wealthy Vietnamese man he slept with every night while Sabine slept alone. His marriage was just a part of his act.

As The Magician’s Assistant, Ann Patchett’s 1997 novel, begins, Sabine is alone in that big California house that is now hers. Both men have died, Phan from AIDS and Parsifal from a brain aneurism. Her husband had told her he was an orphan from Connecticut with no remaining family. Now she learns his mother and two sisters have been living in Nebraska all this time and that his real name was Guy Fetters.

Why had he lied to her? The mystery deepens when his mother, Dot Fetters, and one sister, Bertie, having been notified of his death by a lawyer, come to California to meet the wife they didn’t even know he had. Sabine finds them to be pleasant, quite ordinary women. So why had he pretended they didn't even exist?

A magician knows how to hide secrets, but a magician's assistant learns those secrets as she learns the act. Often she is the one who makes the magic happen while the magician waves his arms and keeps the audience focused elsewhere. And so Sabine, when she later visits the Fetters home in Nebraska, gradually learns the secrets Parsifal had tried so hard to keep hidden.

That home had been marked by discord and violence when Guy Fetters was a boy, and so it is now. Where before it was his father who was the source of the trouble, now it is Howard, the husband of Kitty, the older sister who looks so much like Parsifal. Howard's very presence in the house seems to put everyone on edge.

Sabine turns out to be a pretty good magician in her own right, but her most challenging trick may be trying to bring peace to this broken family, whose idea of a good time is watching a tape of an old Johnny Carson show on which Parsifal and Sabine had appeared years before. They watch it every night almost as an act of worship. Their idea of a night out is going to Wal-Mart. "It's a very romantic place, really," Kitty tells her.

While Sabine works her magic on the Fetters family, the family works its own magic on her, easing her sense of loss and abandonment.

This was Patchett's third novel, and two decades later it holds up very well.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Slow thrills

Slow works for ketchup, school zones, dancing with someone you love and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

Readers of modern thrillers expect them to live up to their genre on every page, but you can be more than half way through The Paying Guests before you even realize it might be a thriller. For the first half you think it’s just a lesbian romance, which may be shocking enough for some of us.

Waters uses her slow buildup, with elegant prose, to develop her characters and to make what follows —  sudden violence, a shocking death, a police investigation and a nail-biter of a trial — all the more convincing.

The year is 1922, and the shadow of the Great War still hangs over England. Frances Wray lost two brothers in France, and her father, perhaps from the shock, has also died. She and her mother live alone in a big house. To pay mounting bills they decide to take in lodgers, whom they choose to call paying guests.

Those paying guests turn out to be a flamboyant young couple named Leonard and Lilian Barber. Leonard works for an insurance company but seems, to Frances at least, coarse and seedy.  At first she can’t decide whether the woman is just tacky in her fashion choices and room decor or whether she actually has a keen artistic sense.

With Leonard working long hours and Mrs. Wray frequently gone for charity work or on social calls, the two young women are frequently left alone together and quite gradually become friends, then lovers. The Barber marriage isn’t a happy one, and Lilian is ripe for someone to love. Frances has known she prefers women for several years.

At first the two women just dream of a life together. Finally they decide to make the break, Lilian from her husband, Frances from her mother. Then Lilian learns she is pregnant, which spoils their plans. She decides on a do-it-yourself remedy, which leaves a bloody mess that Leonard finds when he comes home early that night. And so the thriller begins.

This is an exceptional book that will reward the patient reader.

Monday, April 23, 2018

At the book fair

The Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, held each spring in St. Petersburg, is all about books, but it’s not all about books.

When I visited the fair Saturday, I noticed calendars, menus, maps, paper dolls, greeting cards, matchbooks, magazines, circus programs, autographs and almost anything involving ink on paper. For $25 I could have owned a Life magazine from 1950 with Hopalong Cassidy smiling on the cover. Red Barber’s Big League Baseball Game had a price of $150. Lobby cards from the movie Farewell My Lovely were selling for $15 each.

Popular with browsers, if not buyers, were some Children’s Book Festival posters. One illustrated by Maurice Sendak had a sticker price of $600. For $20 you could buy a newspaper from the 19th century, and for just $15 you could own a booklet explaining how to dance the hula.

A little steep, at least for my pocketbook, were an old poster for motorcycle races held in Tulsa ($350) and a photograph of author Aldous Huxley holding a dog ($1,250). A stack of Reader’s Digest magazines from the 1920s to the 1940s looked tempting, but I didn’t see a price and wasn’t tempted enough to inquire.

Some of the items for sale at the book fair weren’t even made of paper, such as LP records (well, they had cardboard covers), cloth patches and, my favorite display in the whole show, bookends.

I own a nice set of heavy metal Abraham Lincoln bookends, but because I tend to fill up every available shelf with books very quickly, I have never had much use for bookends. Even so I enjoyed the booth run by Just Bookends of Gainesville so much that I visited it twice. Some ornate Don Quixote bookends were available for $1,600. An Austrian set of a man and a camel had a price of $1,200. Some French Deco Girls could be had for $600, while another French set of bronze figures had a price tag of $1,800. That’s a lot of money to pay for bookends, but many of them were spectacular.

But bookends, posters, magazines and such were bargain table items compared with some the books available. I could have owned a first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh for $23,000 or The House at Pooh Corner for just $2,500. A dealer wanted $25,000 for The Long Goodbye and another was asking $65,000 for Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery inscribed to Joel Chandler Harris.

Of more interest to me were two first edition copies of The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols, one for $250 and another for $125. I was wondering what my own first edition of that novel might be worth, and all I learned was not to donate it to the Friends of the Library.

Friday, April 20, 2018

Relationships through reading

What is reading but silent conversation?

Walter Savage Landor
So wrote the English poet Walter Savage Landor. It is one of 10 “metaphorical quotations” about reading found in Mardy Grothe’s Metaphors Be With You. I want to consider a few of them today.

From the author’s perspective, reading may seem like a one-way conversation: the author speaking to his or her readers. For readers, however, Landor’s comment rings true. We the readers "hear" what authors have to say while responding, if only in our own minds, with our own thoughts and feelings. Rereading, whether an entire book or a brief passage, allows the author another chance to speak.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. — Joseph Addison

Addison's comment follows from Landon’s. Just as true conversation stimulates us, as we think of how we will reply to what we are hearing, so a good book stimulates our minds. We can watch television with a passive mind, but reading requires an active mind.

Then we have this longish quote from British writer Alan Bennett:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand had come out and taken yours.

Most of us who spend any time reading at all have probably felt this way on occasion. That thought, feeling or way of looking at things may be better expressed by the writer than we could have done ourselves, but still it is our thought, feeling or way of looking at things. We have made contact with another human being, or more accurately, that other human being has made contact with us. We are not alone.

It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s soul. — Joyce Carol Oates

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with your own. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I have lumped these two quotations together because they say something similar. They both take what Landor, Addison and Bennett are saying and carry it one step further. Reading at its best is not just having a conversation with an author, not just finding someone who agrees with us about something, but it is, in a sense, sharing the same mind and soul, however briefly, with that author.

Reading, then, can take us from talking to touching to sharing the same mind and soul. To contribute my own metaphor, it can be something like a love affair.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

We've been wrong about trees

Trees feel pain. They scream, even if we cannot hear them. Trees can learn. They have a sense of taste and a sense of hearing. They are social beings and can communicate messages to other trees. They sleep at night. Like human couples planning the best time to have a baby, trees plan their own procreation. Then they nurse their young.

So says German forester Peter Wohlleben in his remarkable book The Hidden Life of Trees, published in Germany in 2015 and translated into English in 2016. True, he may be guilty of a bit of anthropomorphism, but his essential points are supported by the work of researchers and by his own observations over decades spent in European forests.

Observing trees is difficult because everything they do they do slowly. They can live hundreds, even thousands of years, especially in dense forests where they are protected from the wind and have the company of others of the same species. So time moves slowly for trees, and they react slowly to change. When assaulted by insects, for example, they can sense the attack and send out toxins to their bark and leaves that taste so bad the insects will depart. In the case of oaks, their toxins can even kill the marauders. But this sending of messages and toxins through limbs and branches can take a long time moving at a rate of a third of an inch per minute.

Much of what people have long thought about trees is wrong, Wohlleben writes. We think they will do better alone, out in the sunshine and some distance away from other trees. Not so. We think healthy young trees grow quickly. Again, not so. Those trees that live the longest are those that grow very slowly during their earliest decades, mostly in the shade of older trees.

Wohlleben's book, relatively short, brims not just with amazing facts about trees but also with advice for humans with regard to growing trees, harvesting trees and enjoying trees. The blood pressure of forest visitors, he writes, "rises when they are under conifers, whereas it calms down and falls in stands of oaks. Why don't you take the test for yourself and see in what type of forest you feel most comfortable?"

And while there don't do anything to make a tree scream. This book convinces us that their comfort is important, too.

Monday, April 16, 2018

The wiseguy problem

"You ain't supposed to say ain't."
William Safire called it “the wiseguy problem” in his book On Language. He put it this way: “When the person you are talking to makes a mistake in grammar, or pronounces a word mistakenly, do you interrupt with a correction? Or would such a correction be seen as a put-down, the action of a wiseguy? Or would failure to correct be taken as agreement with a mistake?” The irony is that as a language columnist for the New York Times, Safire was paid to be a wiseguy

Most of us correct somebody’s language usage at some point in our lives, even if it’s just correcting our own children. As parents, correcting language comes with the job. Same with teachers and same with copy editors, a job I had for much of my newspaper career. But even when we are not “on the job,” the temptation to correct is ever present, at least for those of us who think we know best.

The wiseguy problem is, should you yield to the temptation? If so, how do you do so in such a way that doesn’t offend the other person and possibly affect your relationship? Can you be sure you are even right? And by making yourself an authority, aren’t you setting yourself up for a fall the next time you yourself misuse the language?

Kory Stamper, who has worked for Merriam-Webster for several years, addresses this dilemma in her recent book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. One source of conflict over language, she says, has to do with word choices and pronunciations relating to dialects. English-speaking people from different countries or from different parts of the same country often use different words for the same thing (sack vs. bag, or pop vs. soda, for example) or say the same word differently. Americans, for example, emphasize the first syllable in the word elsewhere, while the British emphasize the second. Who's right and who's wrong can often depend upon where the speakers happen to be at the moment.

Even standard English, the kind taught in school by English teachers and said on radio and television by professional announcers and newscasters, is itself a dialect, Stamper says. It may seem right and proper, yet in so many ways it remains arbitrary.

In one of the most amusing chapters in the book, Stamper tells of her experiences with the word irregardless. When users of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary complained of that word's presence in the dictionary, she was charged with writing a reply. At first, she says, she doubted it was even in the dictionary. Surely irregardless wouldn't be accepted in the dictionary she was working for. Yet there it is. It is identified as not being standard English, but it's there because, standard or not, many people use it in both speech and in writing. If people use it, then it's a word; and if it's a word, it belongs in the dictionary.

As Stamper continued to study this word, she found it has been used, often by educated people, for many years. Irregardless may mean the same thing as regardless. But then inflammable means the same thing as flammable.

Correction of others, thus, is tricky business. Sometimes even when you're right, you're wrong.

Friday, April 13, 2018

The lure of bookstores

Below are some quotations about bookstores found in a Mardy Grothe’s Metaphors Be With You:

Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! — Henry Ward Beecher

Henry Ward Beecher
Beecher obviously was talking about himself and other bibliophiles. For other people, their human nature may be weakest in clothing stores, music stores, hardware stores, candy shops, auto dealerships, jewelry stores or wherever. We’re not all put together the same way, but we each have our weaknesses.

As for me, I share the Beecher curse. Bookstores have the draw of Sirens. Ordinarily I have little patience for shopping. Get in and get out is my motto. In bookstores, however, I have patience until my legs give out. And sometimes it's not until my money runs out.

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos to fuel my fantasies. — Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman
I understand perfectly what Fadiman is saying. I get annoyed in stores that sell new books when those books are on the wrong shelves or when authors in the fiction section are not in perfect alphabetical order. I certainly don't want to see books stacked on the floor. In secondhand stores, however, such things are more forgivable and, as Fadiman suggests, even desirable. The lack of perfect organization gives the suggestion that books have been coming into the shop faster than even the owner has been able to look through them all. Thus, or so we want to believe, there may very well be undiscovered treasures on those shelves and in those stacks and boxes.

Add a sleeping cat and you have heaven on earth.

Even an ice cream parlor — a definite advantage — does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore. — Natalie Goldberg

Sadly, most American towns, even some large enough to be called cities, now lack a bookstore. First because of superstores such as Barnes and Noble and, for a time, Borders, and later because of Amazon, small, independent stores have had difficulty surviving. Even secondhand books can be easier to find on the Web, if you know what you are looking for, so shops selling used books have trouble surviving, as well.

For those who live in such towns, ice cream parlors are small consolation.

A bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is as free as a person can be, because she is free to choose among them. — Jane Smiley

When I visited a bookstore earlier today I noticed on the magazine racks such publications as Free Inquiry, Reason, American Atheist, The Humanist, National Review and The New Republic all standing side by side in peaceful co-existence. The same thing was happening on shelves where books about politics and other controversial subjects were kept. In bookstores, as in libraries, differing points of view get along just fine. We are free to take what we want and read, then argue about it later.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

What's news in science?

Every year for the past two decades, John Brockman has been posing what has become known as the Edge Question. (Find it at Edge.org.) It is always science-related, and scientists and others interested in science are invited to answer it in their own way. He then gathers the responses together in a book. I recently read Know This, the book that resulted from his 2016 question: What was the most interesting scientific news of the year?

The book has more than 200 essays, ranging from a single short paragraph to five pages in length. Most were written by scientists, but others are from science writers, philosophers, artists and even show business personalities such as actor Alan Alda and singer Peter Gabriel.

Even when several contributors give the same basic answer — climate change, for example, or the Higgs boson — their perspectives are so different that the essays never seem repetitive. Some writers are much too technical for general readers. Consider this line from Maximilian Schich: “Driven by the quantification of nonintuitive dynamic cultural science is accelerated in an autocatalytic manner.” Yet most writers keep it as simple as possible most of the time.

A bigger problem for me is that so many contributors stray from science into politics, feminism, theology or whatever their personal hobbyhorse happens to be. Journalist David Berreby writes about how wonderful it will be when America no longer has a racial majority and everyone is more tolerant of others, then shoots himself in the foot by saying, “We are seeing inevitable ethnic renegotiation, as what was once ‘harmless fun’ (like naming your football team the Redskins) is redefined as something no decent American should condone.” No decent American? How tolerant is that? It's like saying, how wonderful it will be when everybody thinks the same way I do.

Imagining brave new worlds is, in fact, a common theme in many of the essays, as if the Edge Question had to do with science fiction, not science news. One considers the possibility of head transplants, another announces that "self-driving genes are coming," another that some "bacteria may have jumped from Mars to Earth." Noga Arikha, identified as an "historian of ideas," mocks this sort of thing in his own essay about claims that reflect "wishful thinking rather than actual reality, typical of what constitutes fast-burning 'news.'"

When contributors stay on subject, the results can be edifying. Several, and these are among the most interesting, have to do with findings that a significant percentage of published research papers, especially in the field of psychology, cannot be replicated. The findings of such papers are often the ones most likely to be reported in news accounts. Yet when other researchers do the same study in the same way, they come up with different results. Too many researchers find what they want to find or what those paying for their research want them to find. As psychologist Philip Tetlock writes, "The road to scientific hell is paved with political intentions, some well intentioned, some maniacally evil."

Monday, April 9, 2018

Write what you should know

But writers don’t always write about what we know, contrary to literary rumors. Sometimes, we write about what we should know.
Cathie Pelletier, Author’s Note, The One-Way Bridge

Cathie Pelletier
Aspiring writers are often advised to write what they know. It’s good advice, up to a point. Each of us is more competent writing about our own feelings, our own opinions or our own experiences than somebody else’s. We can describe people we’ve known or places we have been much better than imaginary people and places. Early writing exercises often concentrate on memoirs or family histories. For a great many writers, first novels tend to be autobiographical because they are writing what they know, about a younger version of themselves living through a slightly altered version of their own early life.

One person’s life can inspire only so many novels, however. Gradually successful novelists must tap their imaginations for characters they have never known and situations they have never experienced.

Then there are all those stories about things that nobody has known. I'm thinking about sci-fi tales that take place on distant planets or in the distant future, fantasy adventures in strange new worlds and even thrillers where the violence is taken to extreme levels. Sure, some knowledge of people and how they interact with one another is useful in writing such books, but they also require a great deal of imagination.

Cathie Pelletier, in an author's note at the end of her novel The One-Way Bridge, tells of her resistance to one of the main characters in that novel, Harry Plunkett, a Vietnam veteran. The character came to her, she says, in 1991. Her novel was published in 2013. For more than two decades she wrestled with Harry, who had been broken by a war she knew next to nothing about. How could she write about a soldier's experiences in Vietnam, not to mention his nightmares about them in the decades following that war? She wanted to drop the character, yet he was too important to the story she wanted to tell.

"I could not delete Harry Plunkett, nor could I change what he was insisting on remembering, on reliving, on teaching me," she writes. "He was too real to me by then." So she did what good writers do: research. She read histories and memoirs about the Vietnam War until she, too, was haunted by it. One important thing she learned was that veterans' memories of and reactions to their experiences in Vietnam are so varied and often so over-the-top that almost anything she wrote about Harry could seem realistic. Details about such things as places and weapons could always be found in a book somewhere or on the Web. And some details, she realized, don't even matter in a work of fiction.

"Did any soldiers in the Mekong Delta ever hear he coop coop of the Crow Pheasant, or was it only in the Central or Northern Highlands?" she asks. "I don't know. Writers take license at times for the sake of poetry."

Her advice to writers? Don't just write what you know, but write what you should know. That means doing the research until you do know.

Friday, April 6, 2018

The metaphor of the bridge

“What’s going on here?” Ray asked.

Orville hunched his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “ I guess I ran out of self-control.”
Cathie Pelletier, The One-Way Bridge

Running out of self-control is something that plagues several of Cathie Pelletier’s characters in The One-Way Bridge. Yet a one-way bridge, her novel’s main metaphor, is something that needs self-control to work. Whoever gets there first has right of way. Anyone coming from the opposite direction must wait his turn. A one-way bridge, like a four-way stop or society in general, requires a measure of patience and respect for others.

There were three such one-way bridges in Pelletier’s hometown of Allagash in northern Maine when she was growing up. (Now she has returned and lives in the same house where she was born.) And so it was easy for her to imagine a one-way bridge in her fictional town of Mattagash in northern Maine. A map at the front of the novel’s helps readers visualize the town, the bridge at its center and the homes and businesses of her various characters.

These characters include Orville, the Mattagash mail carrier in his last week of work who now regrets his decision to retire; Edna, mother of identical twin boys who, fantasizing about a man she conversed with when he passed through town, tells her husband she wants a divorce; Harry, who still recovering from the shocks of a rough experience in Vietnam and the death of his wife, gets a different kind of shock when the woman who runs the local eatery makes it plain she desires him; and Billy Thunder, impatient for Orville to deliver his latest shipment of illicit drugs so he can sell them and pay off a couple of hapless hoods, as well as an ex-girlfriend he stole from.

All this sounds like serious business, and it is, but Pelletier mixes in so much humor that it seems like a comic novel, a suggestion buttressed by the cover illustration, which the author said she hated when I saw her in St. Petersburg in January. I love the cover and think it's perfect for the book.

A bridge is something that joins, not just two sides of a town separated by a river but also people separated by whatever. Pelletier’s one-way bridge, instead of just being the source of a crisis when two vehicles enter it at the same time, becomes the catalyst for the solution to just about everyone’s conflict, or loss of self-control.

This novel won't suit everyone. Some will find it too pat, too light or too unrealistic. I, however, found it wonderful.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

An entertaining mystery

Even if the identity of the murderer becomes evident halfway through A Curtain Falls, Stefanie Pintoff still leaves plenty of surprises for her readers in this follow-up to In the Shadow of Gotham in her early-20th century mystery series featuring police detective Simon Ziele.

Formerly a detective in New York City, Ziele now works in a small town outside the big city. His former NYC partner Declan Mulvaney, now a captain, invites him back to help solve a perplexing case in which actresses are being killed, their bodies displayed in theatrical poses. Then Mulvaney ignores his friend’s advice and decides the first promising suspect must be guilty. Ziele, unconvinced, seeks help of his own in the person of a professor named Alistair Sinclair, whom readers of Pintoff’s first novel will remember. Sinclair offers insights into the workings of the criminal mind, but Ziele is just as interested in seeing Sinclair’s daughter-in-law again. Isabella, a pretty widow of a higher social class than Ziele, makes her own contribution to the investigation.

That investigation never fails to hold ones’s interest. The characters, plot twists and asides about New York City history all entertain. So what if we know who the killer is by page 200?

Monday, April 2, 2018

Groovy dreams, alleluia

I rarely used the word groovy decades ago when the word was trendy, but I did notice that I seemed to enjoy songs with that word in their titles. I was thinking primarily of Feeling Groovy (aka The 59th Street Bridge Song) by Simon and Garfunkel and A Groovy Kind of Love, recorded by Petula Clark and many others.

Much later I realized I loved songs with some variation of the word dream in their titles. Take Roy Orbison’s recording of In Dreams, for example. Or songs called Dreams by Johnny Mercer, Fleetwood Mac and Brandi Carlile. The Cranberrys had two terrific dream songs, one also called Dreams and another called Dreaming My Dreams. Years ago Bobby’s Darin had his Dream Lover. The Eurythmics sang Sweet Dreams. Even The Monkees had Day Dream Believer. Maybe there are some bad dream songs, but I can’t think of any.

The day after Easter I am still hearing alleluias in my head, reminding me of how much I like music containing that word or hallelujah, its Hebrew version. In yesterday's service, the choir sang Alleluia, Give Thanks and Handel's Hallelujah chorus, while the congregation sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today! with its abundance of alleluias. I didn't hear it on Easter, but on almost any other day of the year you are likely to hear Leonard Cohen's great song Hallelujah, which has been covered by just about every other singer out there, or so it seems.

Hallelujah and alleluia are expressions of joy, while back in the Sixties the word groovy expressed, if not joy, then at least happiness or contentment. The dreams so many songwriters write about are not those weird images that float through our minds as we sleep but rather our fantasies, especially romantic fantasies, more likely to be joyful, or at least groovy..

Negative thoughts can inspire great songs, as any fan of country music can tell you, but obviously positive thoughts can do the same.