The Morgue

“Where old news stories go to rest.”

If “Search” brought you to this page, your story’s here somewhere! 1) If you see a “Continue Reading” line below, click it so that the whole morgue is at your disposal; 2) Hold down “Control,” type “F” and enter your search term in the box at the bottom of the page.

2-19-14 Taking Stock

Since I’m ever on the quest for images to use with my (almost) daily news updates and weekly blog post, it’s a challenge to find good pictures involving women. So, I was heartened to hear about the effort of Pam Grossman “to change the way the world sees women.” She’s in a good position to do this, as director of visual trends for Getty Images, a stock photo agency whose 150 million images are predominant in it field. Getty images appear everywhere, and we are (mostly) unaware of their sub rosa editorial content, portraying women as sexual objects, subservient, silent, and limited in scope and awareness.

Her new photo collection—available for advertisers, web developers, and everyone else who uses images is the “Lean In Collection,” and while it isn’t perfect yet, it shows the problems with the way women have long been portrayed in stock photos.

I recall complaining to the staff director of a major national research organization that his summary of an academic conference referred to “Dr. So-and-so” and “Dr. Such-and-such” (all men) while women with equivalent academic credentials were “Susan” and “Tracy.” Excuse me? While at first he was reluctant to hear it, as the enormity of his blind spot dawned on him, he was horrified. As well he might be.

“This idea of a woman who has to be perfectly composed and looks totally flawless all the time — everyone is just getting sick of it,” Grossman says. “In an image, is the woman talking in the meeting or passively listening?” Grossman says. “Little, subtle visual cues like that are really important, and we were really very granular about those kinds of image details.”

Getty will also offer two women-focused photography grants totaling $30,000.

Since posting this, a friend sent a link to the “women laughing alone with salad” tumblr site. Priceless!

2-18-14 True Detective

True Detective, mystery, thriller, author, writerBeen enjoying Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in HBO’s True Detective? Think there’s more there there? Maybe you’re right. I’m not surprised that its weirder elements are generating the kind of easter egg hunt inspired by Twin Peaks and similar entertainments: the human mind searching for connection and sense in chaos. “I think I see a pattern here!” The hunt is so much easier with the Internet, and some people are making discoveries for the rest of us to ponder. There’s the whole thing about The Yellow King, for instance, covered extensively, and the flatness of time.

The show continues to receive excellent reviews, and you can watch it oblivious to the layers of arcane references and just focus on the psychological interplay among the characters, but for gold-miners, there’s that, too.

2-11-14 Give Yourself a Valentine

Valentine, reading, book, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Pride and PrejudiceOur friends at Amazon Books have assembled a dozen collections of love stories for every mood. There’s historical romance, love on the big screen, first love, true love—all the categories you’d expect. But if winter has you down and you need a little heat, the “sizzling series” might suit you better. I’m intrigued by but unlikely to explore “Dystopian Love” or “Paranormal Love.” Love is weird enough at best. But if there’s a special someone for everyone, there must be a special Valentine’s Day book for everyone, too! Hmmm. “Dangerous Love.” Actually, I’ve read a couple of the books in that group!

My 2013 reads among their selections: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. If you saw my mini-reviews in “Reading . . .” on this website, you’ll agree they interpreted “love story” pretty loosely! My all-time favorite three-hankie love story: Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Happy ending? What else? Pride and Prejudice.

2-10-14  Beautiful Words

words, cat, catsFinally, I know what lagniappe means—I’ve read  it, but never remembered to look it up. It’s an unexpected gift, like when the fruit stand lady would slip a fragrant lemon into my shopping bag of tomatoes. “Lagniappe” and 116 more word are included in a collection of “the most beautiful words in the English language,” compiled by blogger Yorick Reintjens. Right near the top of the list is ailurophile, which, even if you hate cats, you have to admit has a lovely sound. “Chatoyant”—a new one on me, means cat’s eye. (If you read my February 4 post, you’ll know talking about “my cats” is a turnoff, but talking about “cats” is not. So these words are about cats.)

Many of the vowelly words on Reintjens’s list are ones you might whisper, to good effect, in your sweetie’s ear: “Ebullience, cynosure, mondegreen, penumbra.” They are, simply, too beautiful not to use! Avoid “callipygous.” Or not. Depending.

2-8-14 The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt, Carel FabritiusThe 1654 painting, The Goldfinch, which ordinarily perches at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, visited New York City’s Frick Museum recently, and visitors lined up by the thousands to see it. Positively “flocking,” reviewers said. Painted by nearly-forgotten Dutch artist Carel Fabritius in 1654, the painting animates the action of Donna Tartt’s third novel, also The Goldfinch, #1 on the NYT fiction bestsellers list. At 9 x 13 inches, the painting is about the size of two of the novels, side by side, but not as thick.

The story begins when twelve-year-old Theo is injured in a terrorist explosion at the Met and an elderly dying man orders him to pick the painting—which happens to be one of Theo’s mother’s favorites—out of the rubble. Stunned, confused, and pretty much ignored in the aftermath of the explosion, he stumbles home to show it to her. Yes, there is an over-long interlude in Las Vegas when Theo lives a feral existence with his father and delightfully reprobate Russian friend Boris, and yes, it ends with a rambling 20-page essay. Still, it’s a wonderful adventure story that at its heart is about how we decide what’s important in life, what’s real to us and worth saving, and what is simulacrum and worth saving anyway. In that essay was one of my favorite lines of the book, about how different people are strongly, inevitably drawn to certain things—“a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.” Worth the preceding 757 pages to get to that point.

2-6-14 More PEFF

Blackfish movie, environment, film, killer whaleThe eighth annual Princeton Environmental Film Festival continues (check the Festival website for the full program), though the weather environment hasn’t cooperated and few events have been rescheduled. Where’s that film about global warming when we need it?! Even if you cannot see these award-winning films in person, you may find them through Netflix or your local library. Always interesting and worthwhile. Many of the links below include trailers. Coming up:

  • Musicwood 2/6, 7 pm—“a political thriller with music at its heart” tells how famous guitar-makers try to save a primeval rainforest, with a soundtrack by acoustic guitar legends
  • Tiny: A Story about Living Small 2/7 4pm—explores six “tiny homes” and how their owners adapt to them–“dream big and imagine living small.”
  • The Crash Reel 2/7 7 pm—just in time for the Winter Olympics, the story of snowboarder Kevin Pearce, his desire to return to the sport after a near-fatal crash, and his family’s determination to stop him. “I just don’t want you to die,” his brother says.
  • Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde 2/8 4 pm—Hyde’s story focuses on his efforts to save wild horses and create a sanctuary for them in South Dakota’s Black Hills, against the larger backdrop of defending the natural world.
  • Blackfish 2/8 7 pm—Tilikum, a sea-park performing killer whale killed several people while in captivity. Why that happened, and the lives and losses of the trainers, are explored in this “emotionally wrenching, tautly structured story.” So good Seaworld has created “The Truth About Blackfish” website in defense.
  • Blood Brother 2/9 4:30 pm—The story of a troubled young American who moves to India to live in an orphanage for HIV positive children, “a story of a life, stripped down to its essence.”

2-5-14 – Speed-Reader?

ereader test, speed reading, mystery, thriller, readerSource: Staples eReader Department

Click on Staples’ test above and see how fast you read, compared to other groups of Americans My score was 575, which puts me on a par with business executives (I have reservations about their comprehension of certain issues, though.) Staples developed this as a fun correlate to selling e-reader batteries. You don’t want the thing to die just as you’re getting to the good part!

Speed-readers—off the charts! Which reminds me of a joke my friend Paul Frame told 20-some years ago:

  • Tom: “I’m taking a speed-reading course.”
  • Jerry: “Interesting.”
  • Tom: “Yeah, last night I read ‘War and Peace’”
  • Jerry: Wow!  What’s it about?
  • Tom: Russia.

The test doesn’t explain though why the last 50 pages of a good book always go the fastest!

2-4-14 Mate Bait
<a href="http://thejoltjoker.com" rel="nofollow">thejoltjoker.com</a>In recognition of Valentine’s Day, this month’s issue of Wired devotes a lot of space to analytics about what works on dating sites like OKCupid and Match.com and how one man hacked his way to romance. Datamining reveals that some profile words are much more attractive to the opposite sex than others. Unfortunately, all those best words don’t apply equally well to all would-be Romeos and Juliets. But if you’re a man and can use them, surfing, surf, yoga, skiing, and The Ocean are all highly attractive. And, women do well if they can use London, NYC, yoga, surfing or athlete.

Words women use that are at the opposite end of the attractiveness end of the scale are, alas: theater, writing, crime, and my cats (although, apparently “cats” is OK. It wasn’t clear whether that was Cats, the musical, but I’m guessing not.). Men lose attractiveness if they use the words thriller, books, mystery, going to the movies, and Netflix. Good news: men and women alike turn up their noses at profiles mentioning zombies.

“Retirement” is the work-related word men like to see (“She’ll have more time to do things for me!”) while for women, it’s the second least-attractive work-related word (“What? He’s not pulling in any income?”). Most popular TV show to mention: Homeland.

And the best tip of all: Men who use “whom” receive 31 percent more contacts from women! You have to know whom you’re talking to.

2-3-14 Think the Truth Protects You?

police interrogation, suspectDouglas Starr in the December 9, 2013,  New Yorker, describes how the most commonly used confrontational interrogation technique used in the United States leads to false confessions. The method relies on detectives’ observing non-verbal behavior, looking for (or creating) anxiety, never giving the suspect a chance to voice a denial, minimizing the crime and trying every trick to make it easier for the suspect to admit it, even claiming to have evidence they don’t have, with their right to lie to suspects in many circumstances protected by a 1969 Supreme Court decision. The goal is simply to get a confession, and the perverse psychology of the technique is well documented.

Psychologists became suspicious about the issue of false confessions several decades ago and began studies on it. And experienced detectives have begun to doubt it, as they’ve seen suspects mold their statements to fit the information the detectives have fed them.

In Britain, police don’t try for confessions, they go for information. They focus on the content of what is said, not nonverbal behavior or anxiety (proved to be not correlated with lying). Instead, they look for inconsistencies: “For the suspect, lying creates a cognitive load—it takes energy to juggle the details of a fake story.” It’s hard to keep it up. Nor are the police allowed to lie about what evidence they have.

In the United States, out of 311 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—perhaps most notoriously, the Central Park Five. (Ken and Sarah Burns film on the case). Why do they confess? Worn down by the interrogation, an innocent suspect “fabricates a story to satisfy his questioners.”  This is most likely what led to the false statement made by Amanda Knox, which, although she recanted, has been used against her ever since.

2-1-14 Upping the Book Club Game
book clubs, authors, readersGood financial news for midlist authors? Paid participation in book club discussions. Julie Bosman in the New York Times this week described how people are taking “the down-to-earth tradition of a book club” and adding what she calls the “distinctly New York ingredients of celebrity, money and literary zeal” to bring authors to book club meetings, enabling members to ask “about the writing process, their intentions as storytellers and perhaps a stray plotline that needs explanation.” Wow! We are practicing those skills every month in my writing group.

Except for attributing literary zeal solely to denizens of Manhattan (I’m guessing the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island aren’t included, possibly not Brooklyn), she’s describing a promising idea that would work almost anywhere. Sure, there are lots of writers in New York, but there are good writers everywhere. I meet them all the time.

She describes the Book the Writer enterprise, a New York City based organizer of such events, which has some familiar authors listed on its website. In the example Bosman uses, Book the Writer charged $750 to provide a local book club with Alexandra Styron. Of that, Book the Writer received $350. Hmm. Lower “overhead” would make this idea eminently affordable for a book club of 20 people.

Styron explained that “in the past she had appeared at book clubs for no charge, sometimes driving herself out to New Jersey on a weeknight” (emphasis added). I’m delighted her dedication is finally being rewarded.

Jean Hanff Korelitz, the former Princeton, N.J., resident and novelist who launched Book the Writer said, “There were so many writers I know and admire who I also knew would appreciate any income at all.”

1-30-14 Smartphone Travel Apps

Smartphone Travel AppsTechnology is keeping up with our restless feet. Last fall for my Danube cruise, I downloaded an app to my smartphone that would translate my words into those tonguetwisty Hungarian, Slavic, and Romanian languages. And if I was reluctant to attempt the pronunciation, it would even say the word or phrase for me. (“Where is the bathroom?” and all the local variants for “eel” being my two essential pieces of linguistic knowledge for travel anywhere in the world.)

What I downloaded was the iHandy translator Pro, which was easy and intuitive to use, though obviously you need a wi-fi connection! Wired has assembled a list of the eight “best apps for world travelers.” The list includes apps for both iOS and Android that let you make and manage your rez and your $$$, and help you explore your destination once you get there.

1-29-14 Environmental Film Festival

Even if you don’t live in Princeton, you may be interested in the films curated for the eighth annual Princeton Environmental Film Festival. The links below provide more information about several of the films (check the Festival website for the full program), and they may be available through Netflix, or your own library or organization might want to sponsor a showing. The festival is sponsored by the Princeton Public Library, 65 Witherspoon Street, in downtown Princeton, New Jersey, and runs from January 30 to February 9.

Thin Ice documentary
Thin Ice documentary

THURSDAY,  JANUARY 30

7 pm –  Thin Ice: The Inside Story of Climate ScienceFor more than three years a geologist recorded scientists working in the Arctic, Antarctic, Europe, the United States and elsewhere who are racing to understand Earth’s changing climate.

 FRIDAY, JANUARY 31

Noon – Elemental is the story of three people—an Indian government official investigating India’s dying Ganges River, a Canadian woman’s fight against development of the Tar Sands, an oil deposit larger than Florida, and Australian inventor who has created a revolutionary, but untested device to slow global warming.

4 pm – Parrot Confidential, a PBS Nature production about the fate of parrots who become pets.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1

1 pm –To Be Forever Wild, created by a group of filmmakers, musicians and artists in New York’s Catskill Mountains, “America’s first wilderness” and the people who live in and visit the region. “It’s a film that inspires people to reconnect with nature in their own way, wherever they happen to be.”

Brooklyn Farmer film
Brooklyn Farmer film

3 pmBrooklyn Farmer tells about the challenges facing urban farmers trying to develop a sustainable rooftop farm in the heart of the nation’s largest city.

 7 pm – GMO OMGdescribes the systematic corporate attempts to manage seed diversity, genetically alter food, and what we know and don’t know about the associated health and environmental risks.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 2

11 am –  A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet The history of the 50-year environmental movement, narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep, told through the stories of some of its astonishing leaders.

1-28-14  The Invisible Woman

Ralph Fiennes, The Invisible Woman

This Ralph Fiennes film (trailer) about Charles Dickens and his mistress Ellen Ternan, which is based on the book by Claire Tomalin, never catches fire, It’s a puzzle to know what the two see in each other. She is 18, and he is 45; she is an actress of modest talent, and he is an international phenomenon. He left his wife and the mother of his 10 children over the affair, so there must have been more passion involved than comes across in the movie—a lugubrious tale in which neither seems very smitten with the other. (Nor any hint of the kind of father he really was.) The 21-year age-difference between Ralph Fiennes and his fictional Ellen, Felicity Jones, just seemed kind of creepy. Rotten Tomatoes gives it 4 stars and a rating of 77.

I admire Fiennes, though. Reviewing the pictures of his I’ve seen, those I remember best are pretty depressing—The English Patient, Schindler’s List, Sonnenschein, The Reader, The Constant Gardner. (No wonder I like him! There’s nothing like a real downer to give you some perspective.) Though the modern-day Coriolanus he directed was extraordinary (trailer). Still, I’m looking forward to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which promises to show a lighter side.

1-27-14 Oops!

handwriting, penmanshipFriday was John Hancock’s birthday and, no coincidence, National Handwriting Day — and I found out too late to celebrate appropriately. One thing you can still do is take the “Trait of the Day” test from the International Grapho-Analysis Society, Inc., and find out what your scrawls say about you.

The Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association (WIMA) began honoring this special day  in 1977 to counter the neglect of penmanship and celebrate each writer’s individuality. My own penmanship (above) is in the state it’s in because a sixth grade substitute teacher dismissed my penmanship, saying, “Oh. You’re left-handed. You’ll never have nice handwriting.” That started me on a lifelong quest to prove her wrong, though now, there are alternatives.  Even to the keyboard.

Molskine’s handwritten tweets contest includes entries from Katie Couric and AirBnB founder Joe Gebbia. Handwrite a tweet by writing your message on paper and taking a photo with your phone. Tweet it using the hashtags: #HandwritingDay and #mHDay. A handwritten message is always welcome, no matter what day it is.

1-24-14 Fences

August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (1987) drama currently playing at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, directed by Phylicia Rashad, is a classic drama of family shattering apart, despite what the parents do—and think they do—to hold it together. In memorable cast, the principal character is Troy Maxson, the father, superbly acted by Esau Pritchett, in a “potent and fearsome portrayal,” says the New York Times. (The role won Tony Awards for both James Earl Jones and Denzel Washington.)

Maxson’s vision of what life can be for blacks in America cannot stretch beyond his own experience and disappointment as would-be professional baseball player. In 1957, when the play takes place, he cannot hear the faint stirrings of the Civil Rights movement some 700 miles south of Pittsburgh. But his son does. The gradually expanding fence around the family home prompts a character’s musing that “some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in.” This mixed motivation is what drives Fences—that and Maxson’s determination in every aspect of his life to swing for them.

1-23-14 What Do Authors Earn?

author income, free booksDepressing survey results from Digital Book World revealed the ramifications of Really Cheap Books. Most authors—that is, people with a creative idea of some kind, sitting at a computer, maybe at 5 a.m. before the kids get up, or at 11 p.m. until the wee smalls while the kids are (intermittently) asleep, struggling to put words-to-screen, words that will inspire, move, excite their readers—most of those people make less than $1000 a year.

Worse, 90 percent of “aspiring authors” make $0. The Big Goose-Egg. These are not just self-published authors turning out chaff, but also authors whose work was sufficiently promising that traditional publishers picked them up.

It makes sense that ebooks should be cheaper than “real” books, and so should self-published books, maybe (though marketing those self-published books certainly is not free to the author). But free? 99-cents? Perhaps the book-buying dollar is finite and now just spread over more authors; and, with income numbers like those, perhaps the problem (if it is a problem) of too many books will be self-correcting. Whatever.

If I thought there was a stronger link between book quality and sales I wouldn’t be so sad about these income figures. But I suspect there’s a lot of good work and a lot of promising talent worth nourishing that are withering from neglect.

1-22-14 American Hustle

American Hustle movie

American Hustle movie

Movies about grifters and scams delight me, and American Hustle (trailer) is an especially good one, well-deserving the praise it’s received with Oscar nominations in all major categories. Christian Bale is comb-over perfection as small-time hustler Irving Rosenfeld, who comes into his larcenous own when he teams up with gorgeous Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams).

Loosely (very loosely) based on the 1970s Abscam scandal, Irving and Sydney are soon in way over their heads and beholden to manipulative FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). He involves them in a play to take down New Jersey politicians, the mob, and everyone with a hand out between them and the rebirth of Atlantic City, with good-guy Camden mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) collateral damage. No mistake, they’re all hustling. It is pure fun, and Jennifer Lawrence’s Oscar-nominated performance as Irving’s dim wife is totally worth the price of admission. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 93.

Favorite line and secret to Irving’s success: “People hear what they want to hear.”

Other fascinating scam-artist movies: *****House of Games (screenplay by playwright David Mamet); ****The Spanish Prisoner (Steve Martin, again written by David Mamet); ****The Grifters (Annette Bening, John Cusack, Anjelica Huston). You’ll enjoy being taken for a ride!

1-21-14 Publishers’ Promotion Picks

A panel of four publishing industry insiders convened by Digital Book World recently discussed which social media and marketing tools they actually use—and want to see their authors using. In order of convergence, the following:

All four panelists said they use: Amazon author pages, Facebook (they want authors to have an author fan page, too, but complain that Facebook keeps changing), Twitter (the best way to drive people to video content), so no surprise videos and YouTube get top rankings, Google+ (to improve the author’s rankings in Google), Goodreads (good for preorders, but requires heavy engagement, and the author’s own website and blogs.

Three of the four marketers like and use email newsletters—and one of the four said this was her top choice of all social strategies. Pinterest for projects with visual content. Google Hangouts for authors with a fan base.

Half of them like other (non-Amazon) author tools, but Amazon is tops; Tumblr (for people with very specific content or audience); paid search (for those who can capture a niche and don’t have to bid up against a popular search term like ebook or mystery); mobile-specific advertising; advertising on YouTube and Twitter; Vine.

Only one uses Flipboard. Although it requires a lot of content, it eventually may replace author websites, they predicted. None of the four is using Snapchat, or Pinterest promoted pins.

It was good to hear the marketers acknowledge that these tools “take a lot of bandwidth”! Doesn’t leave a lot of time for creating books, art, music, photographs or whatever else the creative world can conjure up.

1-20-14 Her

About a minute into the Spike Jonze movie Her (trailers) I remembered the previews and shuddered. Not my thing. Set in the very-near-future, this semi-sci-fi film tells the story of hapless Theodore Twomby, an eminently likeable guy (Joaquin Phoenix), in the final stages of divorce. He falls in love with a seriously upgraded Siri, named Samantha, and while she has computer chops when it comes to reading at lightning speed and organizing his day, the more he interacts with her, the more she learns, and the more real her reactions become. Emotion encroaches. And she begins to long for a body. You get it.

How this relates to the future of computing and the Singularity (when the machines become smarter than we are) is described here, in one of the many blogs attempting to deconstruct the movie’s significance—either as a touchstone for technology to come or for relationships “in the modern age.”

Samantha brings Theo out of his post-divorce emotional shell, an ironic malady since his day-job is writing heart-felt letters for other people, sometimes for years, and for all involved not that much different from having a relationship with someone who doesn’t exist. This job apparently pays big bucks, since with his one income, he lives in a fabulous high-floor apartment in downtown Los Angeles (above).

The movie should have gone for straight satire, because when people interact with him and realize his girlfriend is an Operating System, it’s hilarious—whether they accept it, struggle to understand it, or, like his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara) think it’s pitiful. Almost all the other Angelenos are shown plugged into their own devices, not interacting with another visible human, which makes you think Theo is one node in an epidemic of connected unconnectedness. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 94.

Favorite line: “Is this a real emotion I’m feeling? Or is it just programming?” Followed by “I’m sorry my lip trembled.” Cannot give away the context for that one. I laughed out loud.

1-18-14 A Bitter Reminder

DSCF2780Strange to watch last night’s Netflix thriller, Harrison’s Flowers (clip, quite dark), recommended to us by our twenty-something guide in Croatia last fall. The movie wasn’t very good—predictable plot, relentless tank and submachine-gun fire—but the cast was good (Andie MacDowell, Adrian Brody, David Strathairn, Brendan Gleeson, Alun Amstrong). Roger Ebert’s review called Brody’s acting a tour de force, with his character using “attitude and cockiness to talk his way through touchy situations. Watch the way he walks them all through a roadblock. I don’t believe it can be done, but I believe he did it.”

The story, set in 1991, takes place during the height of the Croatian War of Independence, which U.S. media called the Yugoslav civil war, which has been barely covered in film (available here, anyway). It tells about an American photojournalist who disappears in the hotly contested Danube River town of Vukovar and the determination of his wife to travel there and find him, despite the awful risks. Said Roger Ebert about the unlikely plot, “There is a way in which a movie like this works no matter what.”

The interesting part to me was not just that it was shot in Croatia, but that Vukovar is where our river cruise docked, and I spent some time walking around it. Much has been rebuilt in the intervening years, of course, but there were still rubbly areas. Below is my photo of a famous scene from Vukovar, and the one above, taken near the port, certainly displays female determination. A 49 from the Rotten Tomatoes critics; though 77 of civilian reviewers liked it.

IMDb points out some amusing anachronisms in this movie, but don’t let the fluffs in terms of which tanks carried which identities put you off—I lost track of which side was which, and while politically that was key, cinematically, it was meaningless. The regenerated arm, though, I think I can explain: prosthesis.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 0231-17-14 F8ful Sk8

Last night’s ESPN “30 for 30” special, The Price of Gold, sparked vivid memories of the 1994 U.S. National Skating Championships. I was there in Detroit, watching the pairs practice, when Nancy Kerrigan got whacked on the knee of her landing leg as she left the practice ice next door. The media picked up the story immediately, and man in front of me got a call. Rumors flew around the rink. Would Nancy be able to compete? Would she go to the Olympics? Who would do this to our ice princess?

Nanette Burstein’s well-regarded documentary draws on extensive tv coverage from the time about these two “Barbie dolls of sport” and their rivalry—one rough-and-tumble, her roots showing, the other an elegant, “fitting representative” of U.S. figure skating. But for Tonya, skating was more than a sport, it was a ticket to a better life.

The answer to the whodunnit question was soon forthcoming. Tonya’s husband and his friends who planned and executed the assault were easily identified and convicted. Said one commenter, “You’d have to be a moron to travel across the country to do a hit and put it all on Visa.” Yes. Nancy didn’t compete at nationals that year, but after intensive physical therapy and rehab, she pulled it together for the Olympics. The U.S. had two skaters in Lillehammer in 1994: Nancy and Tonya.

The interviews with Tonya today show how much she remains the outsider, barred from competitive skating for life, and that her fixation on herself has not led to any understanding of her subject. She seems not to realize how spectacularly she failed at the Olympics. Although we see the footage of her wailing over her supposedly broken skate-lace that let her delay skating her long program, she calls Nancy the “cry-baby.” Nancy (who looks so tall and graceful, but who is actually only  5’4”, competed in her elegant Vera Wang gown with 11,000 crystals, while Tonya often wore costumes she made herself) did complain that the gold medal went to Oksana Baiul, for good reason. Baiul stepped out of her jumps and skated an easier program, and there was a strong suspicion that the decision was as much political as anything else.

Tonya confessed to knowing about the assault afterward and was convicted of interfering with the investigation, but it was never absolutely clear whether she participated in the planning. Burstein puts the documentary together well, building off the inherent drama of the situation, exposing the competing opinions, and leaves viewers to arrive at their own conclusions.

1-16-14 VERY Good Advice

Stumble Upon served up a delightful page—“45 Ways to Avoid Using the Word ‘Very’”—from  the Writers Write blog of South African novelist and writing teacher Amanda Patterson. Using “very” is a difficult habit to break (I could have said “very hard”), but it and other language “intensifiers”—words like really, extremely, quite, rather, and the current target of overuse and abuse, literally—weaken your writing just when you’re trying to make it stronger. They are the empty calories of expression.

The blog Provides a handy chart.  Instead of saying very cold, it suggests freezing; instead of very big—immense; instead of very tired—exhausted, and 42 more! Think of it as consciousness-raising.

Demonstrating that this isn’t a new problem, Mark Twain’s advice was, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

1-15-14 All That Jazz

Monday night I saw Monty Alexander and crew at the Blue Note, NYC. I first became a fan catching his gigs in Pittsburgh 40 (ouch!) years ago, and he’s still fabulous. Greyer, for sure, but he still has that great touch, melodic sensibility, and can he cook! The opening act was his wife singing songs in French and Italian–she has one parent of each nationality–accompanied by Bucky and Martin Pizzarelli and Frank Vignola. Then Monty came on with a set reflecting his Jamaican heritage and a band with two drummers and a bongo, keyboard, three guitars, bass, and him on the piano. The group is the Harlem-Kingston Express. You can catch this great show again at the Blue Note 1/20, or, if you’re in Tel Aviv, 1/17. Gives me jet lag to think about it.

1-13-14 Too Much Truth

Hang onto your hat if you go see the new John Wells movie, August: Osage County (trailer) (spoiler alert: the trailer gives away a lot of excellent lines), based on Tracy Letts’s 2008 Pulitzer-Prize-winning drama filmed in ironed-flat, no-place-to-hide Oklahoma.

First, the acting is mind-blowing. The entire cast (Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, the inescapable Benedict Cumberbatch—all of them) are super. Some critics say Streep overdoes her role as Violet, the matriarch and self-anointed truth-teller of the family (who is based on Letts’s grandmother). Surely all of us  know people who believe they have a lock on the truth, an especially dangerous viewpoint for Vi, who sees the world through a haze of prescription drugs and approaching death. As a result, she ends up skating pretty damn close to the thin edge of acceptable behavior, and past it. Looking for nicey-nice? Keep looking.

Yet, Streep manages to evoke sympathy, despite how hostile Vi is to everyone around her. Violet says that nothing escapes her, and in portraying the full range of this combative woman’s complexity, nothing escapes Streep, either. Rotten Tomatoes rating: a paltry 65, which perhaps says more about the reviewers than the movie.

1-11-14 Caesar Must Die

The plot of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2012 Italian drama, Caesar Must Die (trailer), centers around prisoners in Rome’s Rebibbia prison trying out for, rehearsing, and staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Cast in the parts are real-life murderers, drug dealers, and organized crime lackeys—men who know violence—and they deliver the play’s familiar lines with startling authenticity. Tightly controlled, it is a film about the search for truth, inside and outside. In the auditions, the prisoners are asked to improvise a simple scene from two points of view, and the prisoners effectively conjure up an amazing range of personalities and intensity of emotion. You begin your fascination with each character from that point. The New Yorker review here: “A severe and striking new work,” says Anthony Lane. A good Netflix choice. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 91.

1-10-14 Why I Don’t Have a Kindle

Use an e-reader? Technology is gathering consumer analytics about your reading—not only what you read, but how quickly you read, books you abandon (and where), what you skim, whether you linger on that steamy scene in the hotel with the hunky detective and the blonde divorcee who . . . –you get the idea. For example, and to no one’s surprise, surely, the monitoring experiments have learned that readers page through religious titles more slowly than they waltz through romance novels, and not nearly as fast as they whip through erotica.

These ostensibly “anonymous” data are being aggregated by the e-readers offered by B&N and Amazon (precisely why I don’t have one) as well as the newer subscription services that let readers access books across a variety of devices. The data are collected under terms & conditions agreements, which most users of online reader services probably have never read, that generally give the provider the right to collect, transfer, manipulate, store, disclose and otherwise use information about their reading habits. What I want to reveal about my reading, I put it right here in “Reading . . .”

This data source is being touted as a boon to authors, who can find out what their readers actually pay attention to. Personally, I don’t like the idea that writers would make every future plot/character/setting/pacing decision based on readers’ past responses. Will it really help authors write better books? How do people know what they want if they haven’t experienced it?

To me it sounds too much like the movie studios’ giving focus groups the say over how a movie should end. Least Common Denominator Rules. No, thanks. Already bookshelves and movie theaters are riddled with pallid sequels and copycats. New stuff, people, please!

The pleasure of immersing myself in a thrilling novel or fascinating non-fiction story is too great—and too private—to allow some marketing dweeb to perch on my shoulder, deconstructing every page-turn.

1-9-14 Inside Llewyn Davis

An early January blizzard of movies lately, with several more appealing ones “in theaters soon.” Inside Llewyn Davis (trailer), the Coen brothers’ film about an early-’60s folksinger who can’t catch a break is super cinema, and the National Society of Film Critics’ pick for “best film of 2013.”

Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac expertly plays Davis. He can deliver a song, too, though the other performers’ dirgelike delivery of well-known folk tunes has to be intended for laughs, especially that of four Irish guys. “I like their sweaters,” Davis says. As the end of the film so unequivocally conveys, the times they were a-changin’.

The circular plot mimics Davis’s life as he stumbles through wintry New York and Chicago without a coat (and with a cat, intermittently), suitcase and guitar in hand, making the rounds of his tenuous friends to cadge a spot on their couch for the night. This picaresque ramble is the frame for excellent cameos by John Goodman and F. Murray Abraham. The latter, playing an artists’ agent, delivers probably the best cut-to-the-chase line ever, after Davis sings for him: (long pause) “I don’t hear money.” I especially liked Garrett Hedlund playing Johnny Five and channeling James Dean. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 93.

1-7-14 Saving Mr. Banks

Over the weekend, I saw Saving Mr. Banks (trailer), the fictionalized story of how Walt Disney persuaded P. L. Travers to give him the rights to Mary Poppins, so his studios could create the 1964 film (5 Academy Awards, and a  Best Picture nomination). Against her better judgment and every fiber of her being, apparently. The previews give away most of the plot points in the story’s first half, but I wanted to see the movie as an antidote to last week’s real horror film, The Wolf of Wall Street (reviewed 1/2/4). The troubles Travers had with the script, especially the portrayal of Mr. Banks, was attributed in flimsy psychology a nine-year-old could understand to real childhood traumas.

Despite Emma Thompson’s predictably excellent portrayal, it’s hard to regard her as a truly difficult person, as Travers undoubtedly was. You just know she’ll come round and start noticing—and caring, a bit—about the people around her. It would have been more fun to see a Bette Davis or Joan Crawford in that role, people for whom “nice” was not the default. Either one would have given old Walt a run for his money. Maybe Rachel Griffiths who plays young Pamela’s (P.L.) aunt could have done the job. She was persuasively bitchy as Brenda in episodes of Six Feet Under.

Do stay for the credits, which include photos of the real-life personalities and the playing of one of the tapes Travers insisted be made of her conversations (i.e., demands) with the creative team. Although she met with them in Hollywood, she never actually met Mickey’s Dad during the film’s creation. Tom Hanks as Disney is also good, though it looks like they’d been feeding him prednisone.

For my money, the film’s worth watching just to see the cars. Lots of shots of my all-time favorite, the 1957 Ford. And Travers is chauffeured around in a Lincoln the size of the Queen Mary.

1-6-14 You Are What You Read

Scientists at Emory University, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have found that reading a good book is good for your brain. “Being pulled into the world of a gripping novel can trigger actual, measurable changes in the brain that linger for at least five days,” according to a story on the research published in The Guardian.

Reading apparently stimulates heightened connectivity in the brain and persistent changes in the areas associated with language receptivity (no surprise there), as well as the primary sensory motor region. Hmmm. These neurons, according to The Guardian story, “have been associated with tricking the mind into thinking it is doing something it is not, a phenomenon known as grounded cognition – for example, just thinking about running, can activate the neurons associated with the physical act of running.” It’s why athletes spend time visualizing their race, their skating routine, or the big play.

The study’s lead author, neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns, says that beyond identifying with a novel’s protagonist in a figurative sense, “The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist.” In other words, you can in a sense become Jack Ryan or Elizabeth Bennett. “Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person,” Berns told the Daily Mail. More than one might have thought.

Glimmer Train’s editors in the Winter 2014 issue also point to research indicating that reading literary fiction (as opposed to, say, zombie romance), helps people perform significantly better on tests measuring social perception, emotional intelligence, and empathy. Who’s going to empathize with killer robots, anyway?

1-4-13 Do You Know What It Means?

Said good-bye last night to Treme, a series I loved that never caught on big with audiences around the country. Why, maybe, here, in this column by Times-Picayune writer Dave Walker. David Simon’s previous series, The Wire, is considered some of the best television ever, and this was just as good, with the difference that every place The Wire had violence, Treme had music. With real musicians, playing live, not lip-synching to studio stiffs. (The photo is of Treme character Davis McAlary, played by Steve Zahn, meeting with Fats Domino. I want Fats’s sofa!)

Treme showed a dozen facets of the struggle to recover after Hurricane Katrina, to keep in good spirits, to save the children, to bring down rogue cops, to rebuild houses and businesses and lives, to find lost brothers, to stop the rapacious developers—struggles not always successful. But managing to be funny and have fun in the process. It was a show that so didn’t pander to least-common-denominator, generic Los-Angeles-New-York-centric television production that it needed translation of its musical and cultural references for everyone on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain.

No problem starting to watch on DVD, because as Grantland writer Molly Lambert says, “most of the show’s characters don’t consider punctuality much of a virtue, anyway.” And, if you didn’t like the music, “you probably don’t enjoy much of anything.”

The original of the theme song here. John Boutte sings it and also sang the last episode’s last song. I know what it means, and I do. Already.

1-3-14 “Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!”

2013-12-28 11.27.59Traveling to Indianapolis last week, my family presented various entertainment choices: the Matisse exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Benjamin Harrison Presidential site, the Indiana Museum. “Hold on,” I said. “There’s only one thing to do in Indianapolis.  SPEEDWAY!!”  Home of the Indianapolis 500 since 1911, I hadn’t been there since the 1966 race (video clips), when Mario Andretti held the pole position for the first time and only seven out of 33 starters finished.  A huge tires-flying accident eliminated 11 cars on the first lap, and British racers Graham Hill and Jim Clark came in 1 and 2 in a controversial finish.

2013-12-28 11.28.26The Hall of Fame Museum displays many winning race cars all the way back to the early days and other lust-worthy vehicles. Perhaps like me you didn’t know that in the early 1900’s Indianapolis was an auto manufacturing center (Stutz Bear Cat, anyone?) before Henry Ford cleared the field with his assembly line. Some of those early cars are real beauties.

And I rode the 2.5-mile oval track in a minibus at considerably lower speed than the  237 mph Indy cars can reach. If a pro football player could run as fast as an Indy car on the straightaway, he’d complete an endzone to endzone run—100 yards—in .9 seconds–that’s “point nine”!

1-2-14 The Wolf of Wall Street

Save $10 and 2 hours and 59 minutes of your life that can be put to some better purpose by skipping The Wolf of Wall Street (trailers). Despite some good reviews, the non-stop greed for money, sex, and drugs is a turn-off well into hour one, and a savvy movie-maker like Martin Scorsese should know that watching people take drugs gets boring fast. As Mark Olsen says in his LA Times review, the movie is “fun until it’s not.”

The story, based on a memoir by penny-stock swindler and now ex-con Jordan Belfort suggests sex and drugs on the trading floor were common features—no, essential elements—of the work day at his investment firm. Belfort is played beautifully by Leonardo DiCaprio, who appears in most scenes. He has a lot of lines, most containing some variation on the word f**k. Scorsese is known for letting his actors improvise, and many scenes give that spontaneous feel, as well as the impression that a lot of reining in should have taken place in the editing room.

It will come as no surprise that the real-life Belfort is “behind” on his restitution payments, and the studios displayed a savage sense of irony in releasing this paean to greed on Christmas Day. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 75.

If you must see more into the lives of these repellent characters, try the 2000 film, Boiler Room, also loosely based on the Belfort story. At 110 minutes, that’s a net gain of more than an hour.

1-1-14 Incendies

The New Year is off to a great Netflix start with the 2010 Canadian drama Incendies (trailer), adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, and directed by Denis Villeneuve. In it, a twin brother and sister are directed by their mother’s will with finding their father and previously unknown half-brother, both presumably lost in the human fallout from a Middle East conflict. The key question is, how can they find their father when they did not really know their mother? Who and what she was is the first mystery they must solve. Incendies was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film), won numerous other awards, and was picked by the New York Times (review) as one of the 10 best films of 2011. It covers a wartime history, so there’s violence, but mostly it’s a moving mystery that captivates until the end. Rotten Tomatoes rating: 92.

12-21-13 Christmas Bon-Bons

“Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisings and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.” [Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory Hear it here.]

♦♦♦♦♦

“This,” said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, “this is, indeed, comfort.”

“Our invariable custom,” replied Mr. Wardle. “Everybody sits down with us on Christmas eve, as you see them now—servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories. Trundle, my boy, rake up the fire.” Up flew the bright sparks in myriads as the logs were stirred. The deep red blaze sent forth a rich glow, that penetrated into the furthest corner of the room, and cast its cheerful tint on every face. [Charles Dickens, “A Good-Humored Christmas Chapter” from The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 28.]

♦♦♦♦♦

“‘Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,                                  The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung.                             Our families back England were toasting us that day,                                                  Their brave and glorious lads so far away.”                                                                 [John McCutcheon, “Christmas in the Trenches.” See it sung here.]

12-19-13 We Need a Little Christmas

Right this very minute! Shared a big Christmas present this week—Michael Feinstein making his debut at Manhattan’s famous jazz club, Birdland. We are big fans of his “Great American Songbook” series on PBS (the CDs are a much-appreciated gift, too). Not only is he an amazing piano player, but all he is doing to rescue and preserve the music and recordings of American songwriters—finding new hoards in people’s attics and basements and garages—is an incredible public service.

The live performance showcased Feinstein’s superb vocal styling. He sang familiar and unfamiliar songs by wonderful composers, including, from Lawrence/Lee and Jerry Herman’s Mame, “We need a little Christmas” (link is to Angela Lansbury version). Spectacular.

12-18-13 Shakespeare’s Pericles

Never seen it, right? Now’s your chance, with the brilliant and lively production at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (Madison). Even the New York Times likes it! “Superb classical theatre,” says another review. It’s a play that isn’t produced very often—and some scholars wonder whether the entirety was actually written by Shakespeare or if he was just the “play doctor” for another playwright, possibly young George Wilkins. That would account for the supposed unevenness of the writing, which picks up substantially as the story moves forward. (Frankly, some much was going on, I didn’t notice!)

One reason it may not be produced more frequently is that, even with actors playing multiple parts, it required a cast of 19. Poor Pericles sails from port to port—and exotic court to exotic court—to find love. And does. Just enough set and perfect costumes. There’s a five-man sword-and-spear fight, belly-dancing, well, pretty much everything the eastern Mediterranean could offer in the third century.

12-17-13 Philomena

Who would have thought such friendly chemistry could emerge from the pairing of Dame Judi Dench and comedian Steve Coogan in Philomena (trailer). Based on the true story (book) of Philomena Lee (Dench) a past-middle-age Irish woman and retired nurse who sets out on a quest to find her lost son, aided by an out-of-work journalist, Martin Sixsmith, now working again for BBC. Directed by Stephen Frears.

This review from The Guardian says it’s about time the Church was called to task for some of its excesses. And the film is such a powerful indictment of the Irish nuns’ actions, the Boston Globe provided an editorial in quasi-defense of the Church. Though the editorial says the nuns gave away the girls’ babies, in the movie, they sold them. And here’s what Lee herself has to say about the critics who say the movie is anti-Catholic.

I won’t say more about the search, to avoid drifting into spoiler territory, but the story is full of remarkable twists, and all the more so because it’s (by movie standards, anyway) true.

Dench is always perfect, but Coogan is the real surprise. He has complete control over his character and is always in the emotionally right place. Never more so than when silent. Some very funny bits, too, especially when Dench recounts the plot of the latest romance novel she’s read. Coogan also receives a screenplay and producer credits. See it!

12-16-13 A Joyful ‘Christmas Carol McCarter Theatre’s A Christmas Carol is a not-to-be-missed holiday tradition for everyone in the New York-New Jersey area. The 2008 New York Times review is still on target, except that the dancing just gets better and better. Fezziwig’s Christmas party will put you in the holiday spirit, if nothing else will!

12-6-13 Dallas Buyer’s Club

Lots of infamy going around these days. We are reminded of some from the recent past, seeing the movie Dallas Buyer’s Club (trailer here), set in the mid-1980s, in the early days of the AIDS crisis. The story pits desperate people with a death-sentence disease against the slow-moving bureaucracies of the federal Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Actually, by usual standards, these agencies moved like lightning, but it all depends on your perspective.

The perspective in the movie is that of real-life Texas electrician and bull-rider Ron Woodroof, played by an ultra-skinny Matthew McConaughey, who lost 50 pounds for the role. His portrayal of homophobic Woodroof, who goes first to Mexico then around the world to bring illegal (not FDA-approved) pharmaceuticals into the United States and give them to HIV-infected members of the Dallas Buyer’s Club, has been rightly praised. Jared Leto, who plays his cross-dressing friend and business partner Rayon, is amazing.

Leto always appeared on the set in costume and makeup, and when McConaughey and director Jean-Marc Vallée ran into him at an event, they reportedly didn’t recognize him! (More gossip and trivia here.) Well worth seeing, despite the Hollywood predictability of the relationships. Rotten Tomatoes: 94.

12-4-13 Russe Synagogue

DSCF2825During World War II, little Bulgaria and little Denmark did what none of the bigger countries of Europe had the bravery to do—they refused to give up their Jews. Just refused. By not letting them be deported to concentration camps, the country saved its entire Bulgarian Jewish population of 48,000 (though the country’s actions in neighboring nations may have been less admirable). Ironic then that what the Nazis couldn’t do through murder, the Soviets achieved through allowing immigration to Israel, as nearly 44, 000 Jews did after the war. Today, very few remain in the country. The above photo of an abandoned synagogue from Russe, Bulgaria, that tells the tale.

Bulgaria has some awesome thick yogurt, too, served with honey and chopped walnuts. My lunch now, several times a week.

12-3-13 Give the Poor Woman a Chance!

Why is beautiful Diane Kruger—a former German model—cast in such disappointing movies? I managed to see two in one week, and both center around a principal female character with “surprising” intellectual gifts.

Copying Beethoven, the story of a fictional and rather insipid female copyist who helped Beethoven get the orchestral parts of his 9th Symphony ready for the work’s premiere. Totally unbelievable from start to finish, though the score was more than OK. ! It was Beethoven. Some brilliant person made a You-Tube video of the long premiere scene as “the best part of the movie.” Ed Harris was unrecognizable (perhaps by design) in his energetic portrayal of the composer.

Then there was Diane again (above) as Marie Antoinette in Farewell, My Queen. Intrinsically more interesting—the main character is a “reader” to the Queen—as the distant threats from Paris become more than nasty rumors, and the nobility and their servants ensconced at Versailles begin to run scared. (Trailer) Rotten Tomatoes gave this one a generous 92, apparently out of enthusiasm for the return of director Benoît Jacquot.

Kruger has the part of Sarah Lincoln in a biopic of Abraham Lincoln’s early days, The Better Angels, currently in post-productions. Let’s hope the filmmakers do better by her this time.

12-2-13 Luxe Life

High-end designer merchandise presented with the spectacle of a hit Broadway musical is the essence of the entertaining documentary Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s. A New Yorker cartoon inspired the film’s name.

A parade of who’s who in fashion design tell why they covet a place in Bergdorf Goodman—“the best store in the world”—from cosmetics queen Bobbi Brown to style trendsetters Giorgio Armani and Oscar de la Renta (the “de la” is an affectation he adopted, according to rumors.“Oscar Renta” just doesn’t cut it in the class department.)

What isn’t just window dressing is the film’s description of how the retailer decorates its Fifth Avenue facade with imaginative holiday windows that are visually arresting and engaging.

Also telling is that Bergdorf Goodman severed its link with designer Halston when he teamed up with JCPenney to design a line of women’s apparel. That is especially noteworthy in today’s ubiquitous marketing world in which Designer X joins with mass market retailer Y to produce a line of apparel or home goods.  (trailer here – love the music!)

Thanks to guest poster Jodi Goalstone. See her entertaining baseball blog here.

11-20-13 Must-See Theater!

A neglected gem in Central New Jersey is Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, housed in the intimate setting of a former Episcopal church. The plays are always interesting and receive well deserved raves. Playing now is “True Story” by award-winning playwright EM Lewis—a fast-moving 80-minute murder mystery with a brilliant cast.

I received pointed looks when the publishers’ editor said to the detective novelist, “It doesn’t take two years to write a mystery novel!” and I shot those looks right back when the novelist responded, “It does to write a good one!” Lewis’s great ear for dialog shines throughout.

11-19-13 – My Dream Spot

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 134Isn’t this just the perfect place? At a bend in the Danube, surrounded by the cliffs of the Iron Gates, on the lonely edge of Romania, and, across the river, Serbia. Running that inn might be a touch inconvenient—unless there’s a grocery store that delivers, perhaps by skiff. But it would be a tailor-made setting for a mystery story. Marooned travelers, the motor on their boat mysteriously out of petrol. Desperate smugglers. Fleeing partisans. Spies criss-crossing borders, escaping what? Other spies, the police, an occupying army, their past? Next door, the priest with a sketchy past. And, at night, impenetrable darkness. Somewhere out on the water, an oar splashes.

11-16-13 – Google Prevails

After eight years, Google has defeated challenges to its mega-book-scanning project. This article from Wired offers the most complete explanation I’ve read. My feelings are mixed. Copyright holders (as a would-be copyright holder myself, I’m sympathetic) need protection. However as a user, the ability to search, identify, and read an old text (Southern Baptist clergy profiles from central Tennessee in the 1840s, for example, not something you find in B & N) has been extremely helpful to my genealogical research. Plus, telling you which libraries have an actual copy of these hard-to-find family histories and whatnot has guided me to numerous arcane repositories.

11-14-13 Perfect Little Churches

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 010Throughout the Eastern European Region were perfect little churches, with Byzantine touches in their cupolas, crosses, and other features. One reason they tend to be small is that in the Orthodox tradition, congregants stand for services, weddings, funerals, and so on. Standing people take up a lot less room than sitting ones! As you probably know, Orthodox priests can marry (and are encouraged to do so) and wear long black cassocks and hats. I saw one in that dark outfit, with blazing white Nikes sticking out the bottom.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 136The interiors of these churches were much harder to photograph well, but many of them were eye-poppers, even ones I wandered into that were not on the official tour. Walls covered in painted decorations, elaborate altars, amazing light fixtures (especially hard for me to get good pictures of, sadly). Mosaics decorated the walls inside and out.

Bucharest’s beautiful 17th century Patriarchal Cathedral complex, the center of the Romanian Orthodox Faith, includes the Cathedral, the Patriarch’s Palace, which has its own chapel, a bell tower, and other buildings. A young priest walked around the grounds hitting a big wooden board that looked like an old-fashioned airplane propeller. This tradition dates back to the Ottoman Rule, when churches weren’t allowed to ring their bells.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 16311-13-13 A Writer in Your Network?

This compilation of comments that make people who write for a living seethe is both hilarious and all-too-true! I’ve heard them all and would add a couple more: the friend who said with pride that she only buys 99-cent books on Amazon. (How does she think those books get written? Don’t the people who write them need to eat? Pay rent? Go out to fancy luncheons like the one where she imparted this daft information?)

Life Peer Jeffrey Archer said he did 17 drafts of one of his thrillers, and I sympathized. I’ve done nine or 10 of some of mine, and still not reached publishability. So, I’d add to Ploughshares’ list of lame commenters, the people who, when I announce I’ve finished my first draft, say, “So, when will it be published?” At that point, considering the mountain of work I see still before me, my best guess would be, “Not in my lifetime!”

11-12-13 Spiderman’s Gate

IMG_0082 - CopyThat’s my name for this gate near the Hungarian National Gallery, part of the beautiful complex (mostly bombed out during World War II, but being excavated and rebuilt) atop Castle Hill, with beautiful views of the Danube, the Hungarian Parliament—which you see on Masterpiece Theater’s Viking River Cruise ads—and panoramas of Pest below. If Spidey doesn’t live somewhere behind this gate, he ought to! (Note raven perched atop it!)

Question for Masterpiece Theater fans—why doesn’t The Paradise get any better?

11-11-13 Oculus

IMG_0078 - CopyThis intriguing oculus in Budapest’s beautiful Saint Matthias church draws the viewer in through its asymmetrical, spiraling design. The church has been cleaned and restored very recently, and I didn’t remember the oculus’s grazing deer and other sylvan imagery from my previous visit in 1999. Consultation of old photo albums reveals that these images were present, just too begrimed to notice, and that I took on this trip the same chinese jacket I wore almost 15 years ago. Budapestians were too polite to comment.

10-21-13 Wadjda Think?

Wadjda (trailer here), the first film written and directed by a Saudi woman, Haifaa Al-Mansour, explores the rigid roles and rules for women in that culture, as seen through the simple but striking triumph of a 10-year-old girl in a society that keeps women hidden and humbled. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 99% on the Tomatometer.

In the film, two female students are ostracized for wearing bright toenail polish and painting faux tattoos on each other. A believable scenario, but one that’s especially ironic, since the art of henna body painting (some eye-popping designs here) is quite popular in Saudi Arabia. The schoolgirls learn never to be observed by men, even at a distance. And during a Koran tutoring class, the instructor reminds the young women not to touch the sacred book while menstruating.

The repressive atmosphere is not exaggerated. According to the cinema Web site IMDb, Al-Mansour “had to direct the exterior scenes in Riyadh from inside a van, watching the actors on monitors and communicating via walkie-talkie,” because in Saudi Arabia women cannot work in public with men.

Thanks to guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone. See her entertaining baseball blog here.

10-19-13 The White Snake

Friday night was the opening for McCarter Theatre’s production of The White Snake, written and directed by Mary Zimmerman. The play, with three-piece musical accompaniment, is based on a classic Chinese fable, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and premiered there in 2012. Coming out of an oral story-telling tradition, the story is thin, but as theater—the expert melding of acting, sets, costumes, music, clever props and staging—it’s great! The backdrop at times appears as an ancient sepia ink drawing, spreading and flowing over silk, as if drawn by an invisible brush. Bands of pale silk descend as rain. Enchanting.

10-18-13 – National Poetry Day

England's Lake DistrictFor National Poetry Day, The Guardian has posted photographs of ten places that inspired (mostly) U.K. poets.

Be inspired yourself. Visit this site.

The picture (right) is from my walking tour of the Lake District.

10-17-13 Gladwell vs. Chabris

While Christopher Chabris in Slate raised some interesting reservations about the hegemony over social change ideas embodied in the work of Malcolm Gladwell, especially his new book David and Goliath, for me, Gladwell’s strength is in getting people to look at problems in new and different ways. He makes me think, reassess my assumptions. In a sense, his approach stimulates a kind of Hawthorne effect. (“Let’s try this. It’s new. . . . It’s working!”). If social problems were easy to solve permanently, we would have rid ourselves of them long ago, and many new ideas work . . . for a while.

But none of this prepared me for a sighting of M.G. in O’Hare airport earlier this week. He looked harried, possibly from responding to naysayers like Chabris. (Gladwell’s response to Chabris here.) The most amazing piece of information I took from the original Slate piece was that Costco has a member magazine. And Malcolm Gladwell had an article in it.

10-9-13 Libraries: The New Netflix

Wrote recently about libraries’ growing collection of downloadable audiobooks. Now some libraries are getting on the video download bandwagon. A new service called Hoopla (see participating libraries) provides free online access to some 10,000 videos and more than 250,000 music albums. You can keep the movies and tv programs for three days and the music for a week.

Seattle piloted the program this summer, and a growing number of libraries around the country are joining in, according to Zach Patton’s story in the October issue of Governing. Some of the video offerings are of an “educational” nature, and they don’t include new movie releases so far (but then, Netflix doesn’t necessarily offer them, either, thanks to their set-tos with the studios).

Somewhat differently oriented services are cropping up in libraries in other cities, including access to IndieFlix, which was founded by filmmakers and emphasizes independent films—shorts, documentaries, and features—gathered from film festivals around the world. You can skip the library part and subscribe to IndieFlix for $6.99 per month. Might try that.

10-8-13 – The Paradise

Watched the first episode of the eight-part BBC-Masterpiece drama, The Paradise, newly airing in this country. The story, based on Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight), was published in 1881, but its theme—the rise of the department store—is disturbingly similar to that of the ITV/PBS drama Mr. Selfridge, which aired last spring. Surely the latter was informed by the novel, but now The Paradise feels like the copy-cat. Both cover the visionary and entrepreneurial-to-the-max department-store owner, taking financial risks despite the urgent advice of his hand-wringing accountant; both feature a lovely shop-girl with unexpected marketing talent who inspires jealousy among the other staff; both include an ambitious male employee who pursues the shop-girl  . . .

For the Mr. Selfridge series (now filming its second season), the producers spent considerable time, effort, and cash on creating the department store set, and the producers of the new series have not stinted on that, either. Set and costumes, gorgeous. Acting, superior, as always. Plot, annoying in its similarity to its predecessor. The new show dramatically portrays the 1800s’ inter-class conflicts and worker exploitation, but as Variety reviewer Brian Lowry says, “those observations hew pretty close to the ground covered in Selfridge.”

Almost as disconcerting is that British actor Sarah Lancashire plays the shop-girl’s supervisor, Miss Audrey, and also stars in the contemporary drama directly preceding Masterpiece Theater in my market, Last Tango in Halifax.

10-7-13 A Most Dangerous Woman

Cathy Tempelsman’s new play, A Most Dangerous Woman, in its world premiere at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, is an energetic biography of 19th century English novelist George Eliot. The characters of Eliot and her long-time companion George Henry Lewes, are persuasive, and actor Aedin Moloney makes Eliot stubborn, passionate, and by turns assertive and plagued with doubts, without every becoming shrill. She and Ames Adamson as Lewes do a remarkable job conveying the strength of the couple’s unmarried relationship, despite the almost universal disapproval of Victorian society.

Short exchanges of dialog from Eliot’s novels appear between scenes, and in a talk-back afterwards, Tempelsman said she was able in every instance to find in the novels passages that mirrored what Eliot was experiencing in her own life. Although Michael Sommers’s review in The New York Times notes a few anachronistic phrases, I was too absorbed in the production to notice them. If this play comes to your area, do not miss it! (The costume director deserves special praise.) Interesting biographical piece here.

Her novels: Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Felix Holt, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, Romola.

10-4-13 An Archaeology of War and Love

Leslie Maitland’s family memoir, Crossing the Borders of Time, tells the story of her family’s exodus from the Black Forest town of Freiburg  to France, Casablanca, Cuba, and, finally, Manhattan’s Washington Heights. They escaped on the last refugee ship to leave France before  Hitler closed the ports in 1942, and her mother was heartbroken at leaving on the docks the handsome Catholic Frenchman she had promised to marry. Maitland, an investigative reporter for the New York Times for 17 years, grounds her family’s fragmentary and sometimes colorful memories—as well as what she herself could discover—in the turbulent history of the time. In their story figure a hidden telegram, betrayals, and moments of heroism. But throughout the years and despite a subsequent marriage, Maitland’s mother never stopped mourning her lost love. So, as a piece of her research, Maitland sets out to find him. What happened next has been controversial, but most readers respond warmly to this well crafted memoir.

10-3-2013 Founding Dad

A new library at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s historic homestead in Alexandria, Virginia, is a $106 million showplace that project sponsors hope will be the international center for scholarship about our nation’s first president. At the core of the library’s holdings is a collection of Washington’s own books and papers. And Martha’s letters. Administrators hope to make the new library a state-of-the-art digital source for Washington researchers, too. Largely self-educated, Washington owned perhaps 900 books and had many more papers and pamphlets key to understanding the early days of the Republic. Closer to (my) home, the David Library of the American Revolution in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, is starting its fall series of lectures and activities. Its impressive collection is a treasure trove for historians and genealogists investigating pre- and post-Colonial America.

10-2-2013 – Writing Geniuses

IMG_0206VickiWeisfeldTarellMcCraneyCongratulations to Karen Russell and Tarell McCreaney for being among the 25 MacArthur Foundation Fellows this year. Russell’s book Swamplandia! is reviewed in “Reading . . . ,” and the photo is of McCreaney with me (shameless!) at McCarter Theatre, where his The Brother/Sister Plays premiered. He’s now working at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Another creative writer, Donald Antrim of Columbia University, also was named a Fellow. Fellowship—which gives awardees the popular sobriquet “genius”—receive a no-strings attached stipend of $125,000 a year for five years. Like the Medicis bankrolled the Renaissance, generous patrons help genius flower.

10-1-13  Sources of Inspiration

The title alone of Kimberly Bunker’s essay for Glimmer Train—“The Fear of Not Being Interesting”—is  nail-on-the-head irresistible. She says this fear never stops her from talking, only writing. Bunker favors waiting for interesting subjects and ideas to appear versus trying hard to find them. Which is not the same as waiting for your Muse to ring the doorbell, accompanied by her handmaiden, Serendipity. Said Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This seems to be Bunker’s message, too. “Cultivate a mindset that’s receptive to but not obsessive about ideas, and . . . be methodical about pursuing ideas that seem worth pursuing.”

In some respects this is the same wavelength the young Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, was on, when she wrote prayers at the Iowa Writers’ workshop. One of them began, “Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine.” (The September 16 issue of The New Yorker contains a selection of these prayers.) Most other writers would expect more credit.

9-30-13 Populaire

The French romantic comedy Populaire doesn’t reach the politically incorrect depths of David Gilmour (it doesn’t take itself nearly so seriously), mostly because a film whose propelling action is a secretaries’ speed-typing competition cannot possibly be anything but a send-up. Romain Duris is the oh-so-French boss, and Déborah François his awkward new secretary. She’s terrible at everything except her two-fingered typing, and he’s determined to make a winner out of her. This charmingly acted film takes you back to the French comedies of decades past, and the 1950s clothes were terrific. Populaire has a 75 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes, but it’s really better than that. As reviewer Roger Moore says, “It’s never less than cute.” Even if the ending (fingers crossed) was no surprise, it’s a delightful ride! Trailer.

9-25-13 Banned Books

“If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world. It’s impossible.”  Ironic that’s the one line I remember from The Catcher in the Rye, which headed the U.S. list of most frequently banned books in the 1960s and 1970s. It captures the futility of trying to censor words and ideas—even totalitarian states can’t manage it forever. Meanwhile, the book itself is considered one of the 20th century’s best. A movie (reportedly awful) about Salinger is out, just in time for Banned Book Week 2013.

Writers, libraries, booksellers have created a bibliography of  books challenged, restricted, removed, or banned by U.S. schools and libraries in 2012 and 2013, as reported in the news media (about 85 percent of such cases are not reported, the authors estimate). As CNN reports, “Captain Underpants” tops the banned list this year. But that list is longer than you might hope, and includes authors you might not expect.

The usual motivators for pulling a book are that it contains too much profanity, racism, or sex. However, the scales sometimes tip the other way. Responding to public pressure, the Brevard County, Fla., public library returned 50 Shades of Grey to its shelves. Very popular among “middle aged women,” they report. How much you know about Banned and Challenged Books? Here’s the Takeaway’s quiz.

9-24-13 A TV Writing Golden Age?

In a panel discussion yesterday, hosted by publishing blog Galley Cat, media experts say television writing is entering a golden age, and many of the Emmys handed out Sunday night (nominees, too) reflect that. Breaking Bad is cited as a prime case-in-point, winning the top drama series award against some stiff competition.  The outstanding writing (mini-series and TV movie) winner was The Hour—BBC America’s version of The Newsroom, starring Dominic West (The Wire), alas cancelled earlier this year. Jeff Daniels, winning best actor for The Newsroom also gets to deliver some pretty good lines, courtesy of Aaron Sorkin and team. And Claire Danes won the award for outstanding actress in a drama series for Homeland, whose writer Henry Bromell won a posthumous Emmy for outstanding writing.

9-23-13 The White Rose

Last week, I wrote about Alan Furst, and his novels set in Europe just before and in the early days of World War II. In the current University of Chicago magazine (worth obtaining just to read the pages and pages of letters, ancient alums carrying on vicious arguments possibly begun as undergraduates!), is a brief article about The White Rose—a true-life Hitler resistance movement based at the University of Munich, and equal to any fictional story. “For Hitler and his followers, no punishment on this earth can be commensurate with their crimes. We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience,” said one of their pamphlets. Needless to say, the group did not long escape the Gestapo’s notice, though it took some time for them to identify its members. They were caught almost by chance, and their lives ended at the guillotine. Several books about the youthful participants have been written, including Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, by University of Chicago alum Jud Newborn and co-author Annette Dumback. Two highly-rated movies also describe the tiny network’s bravery, especially that of Sophie Scholl—Sophie Scholl the Final Days (trailer) and The White Rose, said to be Germany’s finest movie since Das Boot. Today a square at the University of Munich is named after Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans.

9-20-13 High Standard of Proof

NJ – NY – PA friends – Do not miss McCarter Theatre Center’s production of Pulitzer Prize and Tony award-winning Proof, now playing through October 6. It’s hard to believe advanced mathematics could produce so much drama, but the interactions among the four characters (one of whom is dead) produce a geometric explosion of motives and actions. The acting is superb, and the directing keeps everything moving thrillingly. Enjoyed the movie (trailer) a few years ago, but this more exuberant production—and Kristen Bush’s strong portrayal of Catherine—breathes astonishing life into questions about who is the appropriate repository of creativity and whom and when do you trust? You’ll love it! Highly recommended.

9-19-13 Wanted: Caretaker for Farm

Three middle-aged men, down on their luck, who read “Wanted: Caretaker for farm” and answered, yes, they wanted to be that, became victims of serial killer Richard “Jack” Beasley. In a fascinating and well-told story, “Murder by Craigslist,” Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin tells how the men were lured into the prospect of  a low-key rural life in eastern Ohio, where they could live rent-free in a trailer, drawing down a $300-a-week salary, and caring for a few cows. Instead, they became a trio of not-your-typical-victims at the head of what probably would have been a long list, if a fourth man hadn’t escaped when Beasley’s gun jammed. “Richard Beasley had believed that no one would come looking for the divorced, unsettled, middle-aged men he was targeting,” Rosin says. Beasley’s ad, with probably unintentional irony, described the job as “A real get away for the right person, job of a lifetime.” More than a hundred people applied.

9-18-13 Alan Furst

Let me tell you about one of my favorite writers, a man who will pull you in to the most frightening stories, one easy step at a time until you are immersed in a sea of threats. The time: late 1930s; place: Europe before the war, when no one believes—no one wants to believe—how bad it will be. “I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.”

Often Furst’s novels are about an Everyman. As that Everyman,  you are asked to do one small thing, and, without taking it too seriously, you do. And another. Again . . . ok. And another? Soon you have gone farther than you ever planned or wanted to, but you look around at the alternative. Ok. I will. Great storytelling without the gimmicks of zombies, or vampires, or malevolent aliens. The real-live humans Furst presents are scary enough.

Alan Furst lays bare terrible choices. And how hard it is to make the right ones. Read and be glad we’re on the other side of those years. If we are. Today’s headlines: tomorrow’s history.

9-17-13  Flying High

Ran across this collection of pix to freak out people like me who have a touch (in my case, more than a touch) of acrophobia. Thankfully, the text is in Russian, so I’m spared the anxiety-provoking details. Last spring, when I had to drive across the new Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge bridge over Hoover Dam and the Colorado River far below—whose high sides (thank you, engineers!) protect you from the vertiginous reality below—saving you a two-lane, enormous traffic jam on U.S. 93 over the dam itself, I practically sobbed in sweaty-palmed anticipation. I’m one of those who’d have to have someone from the “Driver’s Assistance Program” motor me across the Mackinac Bridge connecting Michigan’s lower peninsula and the U.P. Terra firma for me.

9-12-13 to 9-16-13 Staycation

I’ve been thinking ahead to a trip in a few weeks where I’ll be taking some gifts, but I already know I won’t have room for them in my roller-bag. Having a dim memory that TSA opens wrapped packages, I looked this up. No, TSA says, their equipment can see through the giftwrap to observe what’s inside, and they don’t open a package unless the contents are suspect. They posted the tweet of a disgruntled traveler whose present TSA did unwrap. The gift? A set of knives.

9-10-13 Marriage of Worthy Causes

A new study co-authored by Big Cat conservation organization Panthera finds that Tibetan Monasteries are playing a critical role in saving seriously endangered snow leopards. More than 300 monasteries inhabit the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau that is the leopards’ home, and in toto, they protect more snow leopard habitat than do the local nature reserves.  This makes the area’s monks de facto wildlife guardians, and they also try to influence their followers’ attitudes and behavior to minimize the poaching and killing that has decimated the big cats of Africa and the tigers of India and far eastern Russia, the latter described in John Vaillant’s incredible book. When a snow leopard kills an impoverished herder’s sheep or goat, it is a huge economic loss. Community leaders now work to mitigate these conflicts and interweave the message of conservation with the people’s religious convictions about the need for “love, respect, and compassion” for all creatures. Support the Big Cats! Great pix here.

9-9-13 Don’t Miss

Short Term 12 (trailer) is a limited release drama that won both Grand Jury and Audience awards at 2013’s South By Southwest film festival. Rotten Tomatoes’ collected reviews give it a 98%. According to The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, it’s “the best film of the year so far.” The drama’s protagonist is Grace (Brie Larson), a young supervisor at a foster care facility for at-risk teens. The work is tough, but life is about to throw her some surprises. Unsought truths, unexpected humor. “Human drama doesn’t get much better treatment in the movies than this enormously affecting and beautifully acted independent film. A masterpiece,” says Pete Hammond, Movieline. Where/when to see it.  I saw it in Chicago and it was spectacular.

9-7-13 The Butler

Finally saw Lee Daniels’ The Butler (reviews) last night, which traces the path of an African American boy, born about 1920, from the cotton fields of Georgia to the White House, where he served as one of the butlers for presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. He’s warned the first day to “see nothing, hear nothing” and remain strictly apolitical. In parallel story, with frequent intercutting—and heavy-handed irony—his older son attends Fisk, becomes a freedom rider as the South struggles against integration, is arrested and beaten up numerous times, flirts with and abandons the Black Panther movement, eventually elected to Congress, and retains his political consciousness throughout.

The latter story is heavily fictional, but can best be thought of as metaphorical, illuminating the internal conflict of the butler living in one world during the day and confronting another world every night on the news. For the couple of generations born since the 1960s, this history, told in part with news footage, may be rather eye-opening. Forest Whitaker as the title character, based loosely on the real-life story of White House butler Eugene Allen, and Oprah Winfrey as his wife Gloria are perfect. The presidential cameos–Robin Williams (Eisenhower), John Cusack (Nixon), Liev Schreiber (Johnson), Alan Rickman (not using the full depth of his voice as Reagan), and Jane Fonda (Nancy Reagan) were fun.

Two mysteries solved:  it’s “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” because Warner Brothers had a silent movie titled The Butler back in the 1916, and you see Melissa Leo in the credits but not in the film is because her portrayal of Mamie Eisenhower was cut. Missed seeing see that hairdo on her. Comparison between the actors and the real thing here.

9-6-13 E-book Subscription Services

A timely post from The Digital Reader by Nate Hoffelder compares the e-reader subscription services of  Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) and the new Oyster and eReatah services launching this week. Comparisons are based on the number, sources, and popularity of the books offered, monthly cost, and which devices will have access to them. Hoffelder doesn’t mention the possibility of free downloads from your local library.

The review was interesting until I reached the last paragraph: “As it stands, I have access to KOLL but don’t use it very much. I don’t care to read on my Kindle.” Nate! Why are you reviewing this technology! But if you DO care to read on one or more of your devices, his introduction to these services and the other reviews linked above may be something you’ll want to check out.

9-4-13 Information Overload

Marsha Mason (left) was wonderful in the title role of The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife at the Bucks County Playhouse’s recent production. The other characters—abandoned by the playwright in some nascent, two-dimensional state—were O.K., not their fault. Most objectionable was the part of the elderly mother, totally defined by the problems with her bowels, and, as I am not a 14-year-old boy, this fixation with bathroom humor wore thin. TMI. The final speech—delivered with verve and conviction by Mason—left me thinking, in the words of the old song, “Is that all there is?” These problems were with the play, not the production.

Marilu Henner played the friend who upends the family’s routine. Henner is one of only 13 people in the world who are confirmed to have the ability to remember where they were and what they were doing on any date you throw at them (hyperthymesia). Knowing she has this ability was actually distracting while I watched her on stage. And, yes, she’d played the role before, so learning her lines was a snap.

9-3-13 Information Catnip

The title of this story could be “you know more than you think you do.” Whether you’re a full-time writer or not, the demand is growing for niche, online content. And, if you are a full-time writer, you know that it’s getting harder and harder to thrive as a freelancer.

The silver lining, according to book marketing guru Sandra Beckwith, is that “No longer is it necessary to convince print magazines to publish your article ideas, or to sell your manuscript to traditional book publishers.” The popularity and sales of e-books, special reports, audio programs, mobile apps, mini-curricula, short stories and other information products allow writers to create content in specific narrow areas that internet users interested in that topic can find. Or fiction authors to create short stories perfect for smartphone reading.

Sandra and business partner Marcia Layton Turner have created a brief introductory guide, “10 Steps for Creating Your First Information Product,” that will start those creative juices flowing. Sign up for more information, and you can download it for free. Their Information Products for Writers website is full of useful resources. And more to come. Sandra and Marcia make it sound easy, but I’m sure my ideas will take some work. But they also make it sound fun. And that will make the work part so much easier. Not quite easy enough for this cat to do it, but getting there.

9-2-13 Labor Day

One of the 27 murals—some of the best and most famous work—by Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera. Commissioned by Edsel Ford for the Detroit Institute of Arts, they represent the city’s industrial development and its workers. They were painted in 1932-33 and inspired by Rivera’s visits to Ford Motor Company’s famous Rouge plant, where my grandfather then worked. Find out more:

8-30-13 The Audience

During her 60-year reign, Queen Elizabeth has had a 20-minute audience each Tuesday with the British prime minister.  No record of these conversations exists, but playwright Peter Morgan, who also wrote the 2006 film The Queen, imagines them in The Audience.

The London stage play starred Helen Mirren, who reprised her Academy Award-winning film role as the British monarch.  A movie version of the John Gielgud Theatre production is being replayed in 700 movie theaters around the United States this fall. Link to this page to see where and when it will play in your area and view a trailer.

Morgan noted that, in a four-year term, a PM would have sat with the regent 60-70 times.  Only one other relationship compares—that of therapist and patient. Indeed, in the play’s exchanges between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson, one sees that confessional intimacy on both sides.

Deft costume changes, often onstage, and quick repartee show the Queen as more than “a postage stamp with a pulse,” as she dryly observes.

Thanks to guest poster Jodi Goalstone. See her entertaining baseball blog here.

8-29-13 – A Lost Art

In the past few years, have you received a thank-you note or other correspondence from a high school (possibly even a college) graduate and thought, “Why is this third-grader writing to me?” The decline in penmanship, like so many other old-fogey concerns, is of complete non-interest to the younger generation, the product of reliance on the keyboard and the younger generation’s lightning texting skills. Now comes an article from that arbiter of American taste, Martha Stewart’s Living—the defining “guilty pleasure”—on this very topic. It cites brain studies indicating the benefits of writing something out with pen or (even more retro) pencil. Preschoolers who’ve learned letters by handwriting versus those who’ve learned by typing are more primed to read, ditto anyone learning a foreign language; handwriting helps people with memory problems and fosters creativity, too. So shun that email “Thanks!” and dust off those museum note cards. Write me a note.

8-28-13 What Kind of Mystery Reader Are You?
I turned out to be a “Fact Fanatic” in the HarperCollins-Investigation Discovery (ID) channel’s Mystery Match quiz. The publisher and vid content producers are trying to find out what kinds of books and tv programs resonate best with their audiences. You can take the quiz, too, at this new marketing partnership’s official Facebook page. Investigation Discovery specializes in true crime stories and has not partnered with a publisher before, while some HarperCollins fiction writers have serious mystery chops, including Faye Kellerman and Laura Lippman. To make sure results of the quiz really reflected my input, I answered the questions again with a totally not-me set of responses. This time I came up as a “Liaison Lover.” Just checking the facts. (Yet, I did NOT vote for Joe Friday as my favorite detective.)

8-27-13 What Kids Are Reading

This report from Renaissance Learning will probably surprise you right from the premise. Bet you thought kids were reading “nothing,” or pretty much. Well, according to this infographic, they’re reading something, especially in grades 6 through 8. Reading—the number of books and the total amount read—drops off considerably in high school. Middle-grade students read an average of 13 books and high-schoolers only about 6 in the 2011-2012 school year.

Also interesting is the comparison of required reading over the last almost-century. In 1907, the three books that were most-often required reading were: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Silas Marner; in 1923, The Rivals, Ivanhoe, and Schrab and Rustum (heard of that one?); and in 1964, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Silas Marner—reflecting, I suppose, a little “back to basics” action. The current rankings of those three are 19, 36, and 900, respectively. Today’s kids are most often required to read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.

This writing prompted me to look up a short story in my 9th grade reader that I’ve never forgotten—“Leiningen versus the Ants”—first published in Esquire back in 1938. You, too, can read this exciting story here, or just watch the Claymation version—a worthy effort by another kid who must have loved it!

8-26-13 Tovarich

Once again, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has pulled off a marvelous coup. This time reviving a highly popular French theatrical gem from the 1930’s—but little-seen today—Tovarich (“comrade”). Beautiful reviews, including this one from the New York Times. The story centers on an impoverished and exiled couple from Russian royalty, living nearly destitute in Paris after the Revolution and the accommodations they must make—including going to work as servants in the home of a couple far less elegant than they are. Love story and realpolitik combined. The acting and is superb. Director Bonnie Monte describes the plot as a roller-coaster, and it is: hilarious comedy one moment, the anxiety of discovery the next, and heart-wrenching choices the next. I have not seen an audience so thrilled with a theatrical production in years. Not to be missed!  Extended through September 1.

8-24-13  Justice Delayed

Watched West of Memphis last night, a top-rated documentary about the murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, and the lengthy pursuit of justice thereafter (trailer). The courtroom details about the murder and the crime scene photos are hard to watch, but Amy Berg’s filmmaking is excellent. Even though the movie is two-and-a-half hours long, riveting from start to finish. You’ll find yourself yelling at the screen near the end, and here’s what you’ll be yelling, “Why didn’t you speak up?” The likely answer, mostly speculation and hints, is that, in Crittenden County in 1993, you didn’t buck the system. One of the convicted killers says the most chilling thing of the entire film, along the lines of “Our case isn’t unusual. This happens every day.”

8-23-13 The Earthlings Are Coming

And bringing haikus. Winners of the University of Colorado’s haiku-writing contest are going to Mars! At least their haikus are. In November, when NASA launches MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission), it will carry a CD with all the winners from some 12,530 entries worldwide. What did it take to win? Two or more votes. Five haikus received 1,000 votes or more. I like this one best:

It’s funny, they named
Mars after the God of War
Have a look at Earth

 Benedict Smith
United Kingdom

8-22-13 Literary Agents’ Advice

Earlier this summer, literary agents, editors, and publishers shared via Twitter the kinds of books they’d like to see. I’ve culled a few of the Tweets reporting their wish-list items below. This explains a lot.

Are these the kinds of books that draw you into Barnes & Noble? Or is it the coffee?

In their own words:

  • I’d love to see dark mythical legends, especially about fairies. Alternate history is cool too. (I suppose that’s “alternative”)
  • Alien abduction horror. I’m sucker for that stuff. (verbatim)
  • Tennis! Ballet! Drama school! Secrets! Hard choices!
  • I also love YA (young adult) about theater school (like FAME), dance (like STEP UP), music (like AUDREY, WAIT!)
  • More than a specific genre, the thing that makes me sit up & take notice is an incredibly fresh idea. Dare to be different.
  • NA (New Adult) set in the Israeli Army (LGBQT too!) or Middle Eastern/multicultural/interfaith NA/Adult Romance
  • Spartacus for teens featuring a girl. I’d love to have an adult vampire novel but NEW themes.
  • I’m a fan of weird, quirky, off-beat, and somewhat bizarre. It has to make some kind of sense, but it can be Wonderland-style logic.
  • Child beauty pageants. Can be told from any perspective.

This scares me. I’m hoping the message reflects the medium.

8-21-13 Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard. Detroit boy made good. As western and crime fiction fans all know by now, Leonard died of a stroke yesterday at age 87. As fiction writers know, he was the master of prose, and his 10 rules for writing—copyrighted, but often reproduced without permission—are legend. Newsday said, “his characters are more alive than most of the people you meet on the street.”

He wrote 46 books, most all of them four to five stars on Amazon, and nearly two dozen of his novels and short stories were turned into movies, including Get Shorty, Hombre (one of the Paul Newman 3-H series), The Tall T (on TV hereabouts Monday night), 3:10 to Yuma, and 20 or so others, plus the TV series, Justified.

Says Matt Zoller Seitz in New York magazine, “Anybody in the last four, maybe five decades who has tried to write colorful but believable crime fiction with characters who behave realistically and don’t sound phony has either studied Leonard, or failed because they should have studied him more.” Reading him was a revelation about writing dialog. I figured out, thanks to him, that there’s so many word you don’t need. Here’s a quick shot from 2012’s Raylan:

The state troopers, four of them, watched Raylan and his crew slip on Kevlar vests, which they wore underneath their U.S. marshal jackets, and watched them check their sidearms. Raylan told the officers he didn’t expect Angel would resist, but you never knew for sure. He said, “You hear gunfire come runnin, all right?”

One of the troopers said, “You want, we’ll bust in the door for you.”

“You’re dyin to,” Raylan said. “I thought I’d stop by the desk and get a key.”

Leonard humor. So simple. So right. Seitz ends with Leonard’s advice on writer’s block: “I don’t believe in writer’s block or waiting for inspiration. If you’re a writer, you sit down and write.”

8-20-13 Even Crazier Maps

If yesterday’s examples of creative maps left you still feeling a little too grounded in the reality of lightning strikes and oil exports and 24-hour Internet use worldwide, maybe you’d like to visit the Koana Islands. OK, they’re fictional, but you can see really, really detailed maps of them and plan your ideal vacation without reference to airline schedules, crowded beaches, pickpockets or lost luggage. You go there in your mind, with Australian map-artist Ian Silva. “By day, he’s a train driver for Sydney Rail,” notes Wired writer Nick Stockton. At night, Silva must have plenty of time, because he’s launched a subreddit for the Republic of the Koana Islands. He’s put all his maps there, and he’s developed a wiki to contain the backstory of the 32-island chain. Judging by the excitement his maps are generating, lots of people want to go there! Like, now.

8-19-13 Amazing Map Collection

Tired of staring at the same old black and white globe? These 40 color-filled maps will make you see the world differently. I guarantee you, there are some “Whoa!” moments in there. My favorites: #7 – most common surnames in Europe; #11-  top 10 busiest air travel routes of 2012 (try writing a few down before you look; see how many you get right. My score? A big fat zero, but maybe you’ve flown a few of these!) And #38 – longest straight line you can sail on earth. You have to watch the video to understand that one. Flags of the world is cool, too. Rivers of the contiguous United States. The Ring of Fire. Wow.

8-17-13 Foot in the Studio Door

Aspiring screenwriter? Universal Pictures is offering one-year Emerging Writers Fellowships for five writers with “new and unique voices.” You’ll have a one in a hundred chance, because the studio will take only 500 applications through its online link, going live September 3. The application will allow you to submit a feature-length script, your resume, and, if you have them, recommendations from industry professionals—alas, the popcorn seller at the local multiplex probably doesn’t qualify! Universal says:

“Emerging writers who are chosen to participate in the program will work exclusively with the studio over the course of a year to hone their skills. During this program, fellows will be given the opportunity to work on current Universal projects as well as pitch original story ideas. Fellows will also attend workshops, receive mentoring, interact with top literary agents and sit in on Universal’s executive meetings. Fellows admitted into the program will be hired under a writing service agreement and must be committed to working full-time for one year.”

This time next year you could be finishing up your draft of Kick-Ass III!  Didn’t you always want to work for Comcast?

8-15-13 A Naked Singularity

First-time novelist Sergio De La Pava has won top prize ($25,000) in the 2013 Pen Literary Awards for A Naked Singularity, his novel set in that modern netherworld, the big-city criminal justice system. He bucked a bunch of trends to get there. First, the book’s length—688 pages—is mammoth by contemporary standards. Second, it was originally self-published five years ago. It slowly achieved recognition and eventually was published by the University of Chicago Press. And third, loooong, loopy, almost stream-of-consciousness and punctuation-scanty sentences, like this one from the very beginning:

“Eleven hours and Thirty-Three minutes since meridian said the clock perched high atop a ledge on the wall and positioned to look down on us all meaning we were well into hour seven of this particular battle between Good and Evil and, oh yeah, that was Good taking a terrific beating with the poultry-shaped ref looking intently at its eyes and asking if it wanted to continue.”

You have to want to stay with a book like that, and a great many discerning readers have. The story is engaging and witty, reviewers say, and De La Pava writes with the voice of “world-weary humanity you’d find in a cynic who’d been scratched to reveal the disappointed idealist beneath,” according to reviewer Tim Feeney.

8-14-13 Sugar Man

Neflixed the video Searching for Sugar Man, the mysterious story of the greatest Detroit rock star you never heard of—real name, Sixto Rodriguez—but he was a star! Just not in the United States. While he was totally ignored here, despite his Dylan-like lyrics and better voice, he became a cult icon in South Africa. And never knew it. The video tells the story of the two enthusiastic South African fans who decided to find out if, as rumor had it, he committed a gruesome suicide on stage, or what??? Instead, they found him alive and well and working in Detroit in demolition. Sadly, a growth industry. Or at least steady work. (The reactions of his work buddies as he becomes a star are priceless.) The two fans brought him to South Africa for a triumphant tour. Sure, there are quibbles with the film, and some facts didn’t quite jibe—like did his family live in dozens of homes, or had he lived in the same house for 40 years—but who cares? I couldn’t stop smiling. Haunting title track.

8-13-13 Mini-you, Mini-me

Recently I wrote about an artist who creates approximate masks of people using information from their DNA—obtained by scavenging recently chewed gum and cigarette butts. But now, you can have the ultimate “mini-me.” For only $300, the latest imaging technology and a 3-D printer (you know I want one of those!) can create a six-inch statuette of you, that, as Wired writer Kyle Vanhemert says, “might seem a bit gimmicky if the results weren’t so stunning.” And, judging by the pictures accompanying the article—they are! Behind the venture are two Hamburg-based “creatives,” Kristina Neurohr and Timo Schaedel, who’ve created the company, Twinkind.

8-12-13 Stephen King’s Openers

Great column by Joe Fassler a few weeks back in The Atlantic’s series “By Heart,” in which Stephen King talks about the first lines of books he’s written—including next month’s  Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining—and why they are so important. His all-time favorite, from Needful Things: “You’ve been here before.” He spends weeks, months—years sometimes—getting them right, so remembers them well, saying, “They were a doorway I went through.” The opening line of 11/22/63: “I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man,” and you immediately begin to anticipate a lot of crying before you turn the last page. The opening line of It: “The terror that would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

All of these examples invite you in like a storefront’s bright lights as dark is coming on. They say, “Sit down, listen, I’m going to tell you a story.” Fassler followed up on this interview by asking other authors their favorites. Results here. What are yours? Here’s my blog post on the topic of openings, which has some of mine, culled from short stories.

8-10-13 Fancy Fungus Feast

Last night, 52 lucky diners (and I!) had an amazing “Chefs and Craftsmen” dinner at Princeton’s award-winning elements restaurant. Chef Scott Anderson was in the kitchen, along with sous-chef Mike Ryan and guest chef Justin Yu of Houston’s renowned Oxheart restaurant, cooking up a storm of specially designed dishes for a nine-course, all-mushroom meal. Lots of other ingredients, of course, but mushrooms were the stars. Dinner started with a cocktail designed for the evening–watermelon juice, bubbly, summer in a glass. Then on to the mushrooms! At least five different passed hors d’oeuvres, then the mains, featuring shiitake, oyster, lion’s mane, mongolian trumpet, mushroom cuisson, maitake, enoki, velve pioppino, and chanterelles. That last was the base of dessert. Wine pairings, of course. Mushrooms provided by Shibumi Mushrooms in Princeton (pictures here). Within a few years, they hope to be growing 100 varieties! Alas, none from the crop in my front yard are likely to be big sellers, unless I want law enforcement showing up with an accessory to murder warrant.

8-8-13 Nothing Is Sacred in a World of Irrational Anger

Perhaps you’ve missed news of the controversy that has arisen over the Bank of England’s decision to spruce up its 10-pound note with a new face: the witty, seemingly uncontroversial, and much beloved Jane Austen. The criticisms do not originate in the laboratories of ardent evolutionary biologists miffed that a mere scribbler will replace Charles Darwin. Instead, the tone of the objections suggests a distinct lack of intellect. One line of social media attack criticized Austen for being “too obsessed with money (a particularly strange and arcane attack given that this is a conversation about a bank note),” said Slate journalist Katie Roiphe. Twitter threats against two women who lobbied for having a woman on a bank note —one of whom was receiving 50 threats per hour—were waaaay over the top and I won’t even repeat them. Three young men have now been arrested for these threats, but as Roiphe says, “The minor and banal nature of the bank note controversy is our latest sign that anything at all can trigger the terrifying, free-floating rage adrift on the Internet.”

8-7-13 Ender’s Game

OK, I confess to really loving the award-winning sci-fi story Ender’s Game, which I listened to on my MP3 player years ago (before I learned about author Orson Scott Card’s various retrograde opinions). EG is an exciting story about kids mastering the intricacies of an extremely complex war game. So of course I was excited to learn a few months ago that EG is being made into a movie! (trailer). Kids, step up! And, asks Wired, “is there ever a time when a kid barely at the age of puberty is ever fully prepared to save Earth?” Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, the sheen of respectable filmmaking. I’m excited. But I have a nagging fear that the futuristic Hollywood gloss won’t be enough to hide the parallel with the real-life, death-at-a-distance jobs of our drone pilots, thousands of miles away from their targets.

8-6-13 Where’d That Word Come From?

Certain English words “sound and feel just right” says Orin Hargraves in his August column for Visual Thesaurus magazine. They are “easy to remember and fun to use because their sound seems to evoke the thing they stand for so well.” Coincidentally—or not?—they “are often of unknown, obscure, or disputed origins.” While English freely borrows from other cultures, these words come with no foreign pedigree. The case Hargraves starts with is scam. As he says, it sounds “just like what it is,” is easy to pronounce, and is in widespread use since at least the early 1960’s. But its origins are murky. Perhaps it’s the sound-affiliation with “scum” that made it stick. Hargraves suggests it was slang in some subculture, just as barf, drudge, snit, and zit, all words with unclear beginnings, were. His full article describes the –le words that have mysteriously sprung up (cuddle, dawdle, kibble, ripple), and the words that gain currency just because they’re fun (bamboozle, canoodle, lollygag). All that matters, it seems, is that they work!

8-5-13 Jane and Jill

Jill Lepore’s mother wanted her to write a book about Benjamin Franklin’s younger sister Jane–he the youngest of 10 sons, she the youngest of seven daughters. In the July 8/15 New Yorker Lepore weaves the fragments of Jane’s life with the rough parallels and divergences of her own. Jane, like most women in her era was untutored, at least after brother Ben left home, and she struggled to write the letters that are almost the only remnants of her long life. She writes, “I know I have wrote and speld this worse than I do sometimes, but I hope you will find it out.”  Lepore chairs Harvard’s History and Literature Program and is a New Yorker staff writer. On the surface so different, but in the emotional journey of life, hers, her mother’s, Jane’s, so true and so full of harmony. Lepore put off writing “the only book my mother ever wanted me to write,” then realizing the slippage of time, wrote as fast as she could, but her mother died before she could finish. Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin will be out in October, and if it is as rich and lovingly rendered as the story of how it came to be, it will be wonderful.

8-3-13  Stranger Visions

You may have read about her in a science magazine. You may have read the Talk of the Town piece on her in the New Yorker.  You may have seen her TED Video.  Whatever. The woman walking behind you picking up your tossed cigarette butt or freshly discarded chewing gum is artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and here’s what she’s going to do with it. She’s taking it home, gathering your DNA, and using software and information from facial-recognition programs she’s going to make a mask of, well, you. Or at least what your genes predict you will look like. Probably it won’t look exactly like you, but it could be your brother or cousin. Here’s what the mask can reflect: your racial ancestry, eye color and, are they close together or far apart?, whether you might be carrying a few extra pounds. Fifty characteristics altogether and more to come. The days of the police sketch artist may be numbered!

8-2-13 When Will the Renaissance Begin?

Faithful readers will know the future of Detroit is a top-of-mind issue for me. A true land of broken dreams, symbolized by the painfully ironic name of its biggest downtown building cluster, the Renaissance Center. When it was built almost 40 years ago, Detroit’s troubles had already begun. Now, in the wake of the city’s bankruptcy filing–which sounds bad, but might bring some financial stability–along come a couple of interesting new reports. One is from the Urban Institute about feelers of help from the feds (containing a link to a fascinating NPR story about how some residents are filling the gap of nonexistent city services). Another comes from Pew’s State and Consumer Initiatives program on how state-level actions can aid financially troubled cities and towns. Finally Governing profiles 10 city leaders and citizens trying hard in various creative ways to make a difference–the kind of energetic, committed people who can be found in every community. Care about urban life in our struggling cities? And here’s a list of all local U.S. governments involved in bankruptcy proceedings.

8-1-13 Don’t “Drink the Kool-Aid”

Too late to vote, I stumbled on Forbes magazine’s spring contest to name the most irritating “jargon, buzzwords, clichés, euphemisms, and grammatical catastrophes” of the business world. They boiled the ocean to come up with 32 prime candidates, including “onboarding” and “punch a puppy.” No doubt some of these loser phrases have made you cringe, too. Said story author Brett Nelson, “For my part, I recently committed the ultimate conversational crime: I said ‘It is what it is.’” Last year’s winner was “drink the Kool-Aid,” a reminder of how awful and overused these phrases can be. The 2013 winner—or biggest loser—in this year’s contest: “come to Jesus moment.” For more of the same, take a peek at CheesyCoporateLingo.com.

7-31-13 What You’ll be Reading this Fall

Amazon’s annual fall preview is out, telling us which books have the highest pre-orders for the coming months. Topping the list is Rick Riordan’s The House of Hades, and OMG, the series has two more books yet to come! In case you haven’t been following, here’s the gist: As the previous book ended, Annabeth and Percy tumbled into a pit leading straight to the Underworld, and the other five demigods are looking for the mortal side of the Doors of Death. The seven must prevent the giants from raising Gaea, but if they don’t succeed, Gaea’s armies will never die. And the clock is ticking! In about a month, the Romans will march on Camp Half-Blood. Higher stakes than ever in this dive into the depths of Tartarus. (If only Riordan wrote in English.) Tops on the Kindle pre-order list is Lee Child’s Never Go Back, featuring former military cop and popular hero Jack Reacher. Also among the top few: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (sequel to The Shining); Allegiant by Veronica Roth (the Divergent trilogy’s “explosive conclusion”—is there any other kind?); and W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton. I wonder if she foresaw this day when she wrote A is for Alibi?

7-30-13 OK, I Want Them All!

Herb Lester is fictional, but the creative geniuses who work at Herb Lester Associates have mastered the very real art of map-making that tells you more than how to get from here to there. They’re London-based, so a lot of their maps cover Britain and The Continent, but there are plenty of stateside maps to enjoy, too. Who doesn’t want–make that need–the New York Donut Map? Or if your Muse is on vacation, the Writing Manhattan map will show you where writers have snared her in the past and put her back to work. Or the places under NYU’s relentless expansion where you can gaze at the culturological layers of yesterday’s Greenwich Village and weep? Chicago, San Francisco, Old Los Angeles (there is one!), Miami, Austin, Brooklyn–soon to be more–receive their irreverent, quirky due. Great gifts. Great fun. Take a fresh approach to your next city visit and land a bag of the best donuts in town!

7-29-13 Houston Chronicles

In Houston last week, wilting in the weather and visiting a few sights, including a ball game at Minute Maid stadium. Lots of fun and lots of beer, but orange juice and lemonade in short supply. Great seats on the third-base line. Meetings were at the Texas Medical Center—a collection of hospitals, medical and nursing schools, and such that are the largest collection of medical buildings in the world, with a footprint larger than downtown Los Angeles! They do things big in Texas. Even health care.

If you’re going there (not in July or August, I hope!), here are two must-sees, from the sublime to the sumptuous.

Copyright Romano Cagnoni – used with permission

The Rothko Chapel – a contemplative space for people of any religious background or no religious orientation at all. Utterly peaceful. Huge monochromatic paintings by Mark Rothko in black and almost imperceptible shades of dark purple. Somehow it isn’t oppressive.

For at least the next few months, the Houston Museum of Natural Science will have on view Fabergé: A Brilliant Vision, with more than 350 pieces created by the Fabergé studio, mostly for the Russian nobility. Several of the popular eggs are included, along with jewelry, cigarette cases, bibelots, and practical items of exquisite beauty. After the Revolution, such treasures were hard to save, and it’s amazing so many pieces survived and have been assembled in one collection. Egyptian artifacts in a stunning display, too.

I missed it, but friends (and NPR) say the Beer Can House is a must-see, too!

7-18-13 Newsroom – Season 2

Saw the premiere episode of Season 2 of HBO’s Newsroom Wednesday. Some of my quibbles about Season 1 have been resolved, maybe. And maybe there won’t be as much lefty-pandering, which feels good but seems cheap. Surely we’re smarter than that. Mostly I was relieved the hysterical antics of the character Mackenzie have been toned down to the point one could think she might actually be able to produce a nightly news program. Last season it seemed doubtful she could effectively order a pizza. At the same time, I thought the gas had gone out of the program. Tired tropes or something. The reviews are in, and some like the new version and some really don’t, like these two from The Atlantic who ask, “Quit watching now or hope it gets better?” And The Guardian’s Jeff Jarvis hates it and tells why, eloquently.

Most interesting new plotline? Dev Patel’s character’s pursuit of the Occupy Wall Street story. That was on my mind when the Economist Intelligence Unit sent out an interactive map of the many places around the world affected by the upsurge in popular protests—“from the Arab revolutions to the Occupy movements,” it says. See the map here. The EIU says these new movements aren’t easily categorized and describes the consequences in global political terms. Newsroom could be back ahead of the game.

7-18-13 Doubt

My brain clouds, as I try to hold onto two wildly different ideas at the same time.

I’ve been working on a project that involves the difficulties doctors have estimating the likely lifespan of people with advanced illnesses. For people who are elderly, frail, and have several chronic conditions, it’s almost impossible to predict the slope of the downward path their health will take. Yet insurance plans, health facilities, families, and patients themselves want definite answers. A firm prognosis. Certainty. Got it.

Then I ran across this description of Eugenio Colorni, an Italian intellectual:

“Colorni believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency. Doubt, in fact, could motivate . . . accepting the limits of what one could know liberated agents from their dependence on the belief that one had to know everything before acting” (in Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman).

A quaint notion that seems to trouble Americans no longer. We seem to prefer to know nothing before acting.

7-17-13 Yesterday’s “Awesome!”

Quite a comeuppance when I glanced through Let’s Bring Back: The Lost Language Edition: A Collection of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful Words, Phrases, Praises, Insults, Idioms, and Literary Flourishes from Eras Past by Lesley M. M. Blume and found I still use a lot of these word, phrases, etc. It’s “curtains” for him? Dead as a doornail? Dingbat? (The Edith Bunker variety, not the little typographical flourishes – ™♣ – if you’ve ever wondered why they’re called Wingdings.) I said “bee in my bonnet” just today! OK, maybe there’s too much Turner Classic Movies in my life, but if you want to understand the slang of yore and the anachronisms of today, you’ll be entertained mightily by this collection.

7-16-13 To a Tea

If you’re a tea enthusiast, check out Lilac Tea Room, a charming blog about all things tea. There are ideas for new teas to try, health benefits, and stories of eye-opening encounters with new tea experiences. This is a beautifully written online analog to guides like Tea: The Drink That Changed the World, which suggests for an afternoon tea—when I could use a pick-me-up—an early-harvest Darjeeling, or, from China, a black tea such as a Keemum. On a cold day, I grab the ginger tea and on a hot one, a green tea. Sit back, sip, and enjoy while you read Lilac Tea Room’s artful blog and ponder the detectives who loved tea. Miss Marple has several tearooms around the world named for her, and you can order Poirot’s Mysterious Brew. And, of course, you’ll want to pick up several of Laura Childs’s popular Tea Shop Mysteries!

7-15-13 All the World’s a Stage

It was hotter than Hades yesterday, but the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is putting on a lively production of As You Like It at the outdoor stage of the College of St. Elizabeth. And the audience did like it! A spirited Rosalind/Ganymede, romantic Orlando, charming Celia, and a hilarious flock of sheep. The heat didn’t slow down the action or dull the familiar lines. Playing until July 28. If you’re in the New York – New Jersey area, don’t miss it. Bring a sun umbrella for the matinees!

7-13-13 Kickstarting 

Coming soon (if your idea can wait): Kickstarter for Dummies. Author Aimee Cebulski is interviewed by GalleyCat about her new book in the Dummy series, based in part on the crowdfunding campaigns (one successful, one not) she launched to self-publish her own book, The Finding 40 Project. (That interesting project is about what it means to a diverse set of women to hit age 40.) The forthcoming book will outline the entire Kickstarter process and include results of interviews with others who’ve used it, case studies, advice on creating a winning campaign video, and budgeting—putting the whole strategy into the context of industry news and trends. Her number one tip: kickstarters can avoid creating unrealistic expectations by telling potential backers specifically what their pledges will be used for. For example, saying “to pay for a designer to lay out my cover” instead of the vague “production.” Kickstarter support can be especially useful to writers, because copies of the finished product can be pre-sold—but all the more important to have the budget nailed down. If you’re selling at a loss, you can’t make it up in volume!

7-12-13 The Fixers

Clive Thompson is onto something in his Wired editorial about the nascent “Fixer Movement.” Americans have lost touch with the satisfaction of the wrench and screwdriver well-wielded. And manufacturers, with the 60-year tradition of planned obsolescence are just as happy for us to constantly buy new. In truth, it’s harder to fix our stuff now, with solid state parts and glued-together components. But it’s often possible, and we’re not even trying. We throw away 2.4 million tons of e-waste alone every year, three-quarters of which is not recycled. Thus the “repair café,” where amateur—and some pro—tinkerers will fix your stuff for free! Says Thompson, “The spectacle of dead goods coming back to life isn’t just useful . . . it’s transformative.” YouTube fix-it videos are one key. Trouble getting parts?  Just another reason to buy that 3-D printer. But if it breaks, can somebody fix it?

7-11-13 Put-Downs

The folks at GoodReads have analyzed what makes their members put down a book they’ve started. Fascinating infographic here. Top reasons: “slow/boring”; “weak writing”; “ridiculous (or nonexistent) plot”; my fave—“extremely stupid”; and “I don’t like the main character.” Some people—almost 40 percent of GoodReads respondents—finish a book, regardless. I’m usually in that camp, though I stopped listening to Darkness at Noon not long ago (too depressing) and I tossed Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, when nothing did. The current books GoodReads members most often admitted to abandoning and their reasons: J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (“different expectations”—no kidding!); Fifty Shades of Grey (“I am embarrassed for all of us”); Eat – Pray – Love (no explanation needed); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (??); and Wicked (“NOT the musical”). Classics aren’t immune from being left on the beach, either. Amusing that several “best books of the 20th Century” also turn up among the most-often-abandoned.

7-10-13 Florida Crime Wave

The emergence of great Florida crime fiction is of the era of global warming like Los Angeles noir reflected its era’s need for laconic heroes and the cold glamour of tinsel-town. Adam Gopnik’s June 10/17 New Yorker “In the Back Cabana” riff on Florida crime fiction speaks of paradise despoiled and arrivistes who don’t know what’s missing. He credits Steve Glassman with the thought that “when you have two characters together in a Florida book, you always have three: a man, a woman, and the weather.” An alternative metaphor is “where worlds collide”—the Haitian immigrants, the wealthy Northeast retirees (unless you’re on the Gulf Coast, where it’s the wealthy Midwest retirees and the Canadians), rednecks and hipsters, the different shades and politics of the blacks, the South Beach gays, players and would-be players, the Cubans, Bible Belt and Disney. Or, as Carl Hiassen said, “If anything is more irresistible than Jesus, it’s Mickey.” Wild and crazy doesn’t begin. It’s a state packed with archetypes of one kind or three, and they fall into crime—into violent crime—like they would slip into the jacuzzi after one too many mojitos or, irretrievably, into the snapping jaws of the Everglades. They drive too fast (or wayyyy too slow) and live in ramshackle houses that will never see a swimming pool but are painted the color of one. Sample some orange-juicy reading here.

7-9-13 Hitchcock

A Netflix choice that alternates satisfying scenes with the merely ok, but great performances from Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, and Scarlett Johansson make the biopic Hitchcock (trailer) fun to watch. It’s set during the filming of Psycho—conducted in utmost secrecy—a movie no one wanted him to make, but one the husband-wife team of Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville really needed to be a hit. They’d had to finance it themselves and mortgaged their house to do it. Reviewers panned the film, irritated at Hitch’s “rules” about no one coming into the theater late and no one revealing the ending. But the studio was only going to open the movie in a couple of theaters, and Hitch had to build enough buzz to ensure a sell-out. It cost $800,000, and within six months of its release, Paramount sent Hitch a check for over $2 million. Long before he died, it made him another 10 times that. My copy of The Dark Side of Genius suggests some things went a little differently, but not his reliance on Alma.

7-2-13 The Happiness Index

Last month, researchers at the University of Vermont published “The Geography of Happiness,” based on their analysis of the “happiness content” of tweets. The extensive media coverage has had a field day with speculation and teemed with the inevitable methodological quibbles. Are the high-happiness tweets emanating from Nevada a reflection of Nevadans state of mind or distorted by the effusions of gaming table winners and Elvis Chapel brides? (Losers, presumably, aren’t tweeting. They’re at the bar.) Maine and Hawai`i are the other highest-happiness states. Perhaps because they are so far away from the folks in Nevada. At the sad end are Mississippi and Louisiana. While the depressed emotional content of their tweets may be understandable, given an array of grim socioeconomic data from other sources, one can only presume that the folks of New Orleans don’t tweet often enough to counterbalance the rest of the state. In the bar, perhaps. The most important aspect of this innovative research is its attempt to mine the content of geocoded tweets based on individual words, stripped of context, and correlate them with an array of other data, which raises the intriguing possibility for interesting (and spurious) real-time correlations.

7-1-13 In Awe of Audio

I’ve been a subscriber to Audible.com for at least a decade and, through that service, I have listened to 279 audio books—classics, thrillers, literary fiction, non-fiction, all of Dickens—thousands of hours of pure pleasure. So, nice to see the shout-out to the amazing craft of audio book narration in Sunday’s New York Times. The rising popularity of digitized audio “has created a burgeoning employment opportunity for actors . . . , allowing them to pay their bills doing something other than waiting on tables.” In general, they are amazing.

They must play both men and women, old and young, various ethnicities, and reveal a multitude of characters so that the listener can engage with them—and tell them apart. They have to do with their voice what we do automatically when reading a printed text.

At the end of May, the Audio Publishers Association gave the “Audie” award for Audiobook of the Year to Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, published by Audible, Inc., read by Academy Award winner Colin Firth. But many of my favorite audiobooks have been read by actors whose names are not familiar. For short reviews of my 2013 audiobooks, see Reading . . .

6-29-13 Lookalikes

The observation that people and their dogs sometimes bear a striking resemblance—old ladies with their hair bleached the same color as their pup of some tiny, fluffy breed, for example—has reached new heights in the work of artist Sebastian Magnani. An article on his work, which the Huffington Post calls a “pet project,” shows examples of how he’s dressed dogs and owners alike, placing their photoportraits side by side for easy comparison. Eerie. And hilarious. Makes me glad to be a cat-owner, though modeling myself on that on that sweet doggie at left wouldn’t be a bad thing. I like the bit of curl.

6-27-13 No More Meatloaf!

Random House’s Tastebook online food community includes a set of products that will let you make your own fancy cookbook for yourself, for gifts, for Posterity. Compile recipes from the Tastebook website, add your own, or both—for a fee, of course. Possibly some version of this (and some price negotiation) would be a fun(d)raiser for organizations, too. I did an “Our Family Recipes” gift book the old-fashioned way—in Word—a few years ago, then lost the e- file. When it was sent back to me, the chefs in cyberspace had helpfully corrected my measurements, so that “Strawberry Pancake,” for example, now calls for VA cup butter, 3 eggs, 1 lA cups milk, Vi cup sugar, VA cup all-purpose flour (unsifted), and VA teaspoon salt, plus the strawberries. I sense that “too many cooks” mess-ups like this wouldn’t happen with Tastebook.

6-25-13 Promised Land

Saw the preview of Gus Van Sant’s fracking movie Promised Land (trailer) in theaters so often, I had to wait to get it from Netflix, until I could forget all the giveaways to the Big Gas versus feisty environmentalist plot.

The movie received middling reviews, though Matt Damon and Frances McDormand are excellent, as always. And, it has Hal Holbrook as not Mark Twain. The problem is the story–all-too-predictable and with an eye-roll inspiring switcheroo near the finish. Still, the film raised the ire of the gas industry, whose opposition brought it a fair amount of free publicity. “Earnest and well-intentioned,” Rotten Tomatoes says, and right away you feel the problem. A shout-out to my friends in Columbiana County, Ohio, who are in the middle of the fracking controversy—much more complicated decision-making than this sentimental film implies.

6-24-13 Lady Liberty

Yesterday’s boat tour of the lower end of Manhattan to celebrate a friend’s 90th stopped a few minutes at the Statue of Liberty (reopening by July 4, when repair crews hope to have completed restorations needed after hurricane Sandy). After working on the family genealogy, I have a more personal sense of how people who made that long voyage across the Atlantic in steerage, like my Hungarian grandfather, must have felt to see her  rise above the horizon. Excitement apprehension gratitude and fear boiling in one 16-year-old boy’s body. How I wish I’d asked him about that!

The irony of this romanticized image against the current peevish and narrow-minded immigration debate is not lost on me. Let’s make sense of the immigration mess so we can give new generations of immigrants the welcome felt by my grandparents and great-grandparents (yours, too, maybe).

6-22-13 James Gandolfini

Yes, we all immediately thought “Sopranos” when we heard James Gandolfini died suddenly this week. But if you want to celebrate another dimension of his talent, Netflix In the Loop (trailer), a powerfully witty British satire about the run-up to the Iraq war. It had great reviews, but not a big audience in this country. Gandolfini plays a U.S. lieutenant general, and it’s scary seeing him in a uniform. The British prime minister’s foul-mouthed communications director was modeled on the real thing: Tony Blair’s famously profane aide, Alistair Campbell. [“More than Tony Soprano” in The Jersusalem Post reprises 10 of Gandolfini’s best roles.]

6-21-13 The Empty Room

Book launch party for my writing coach Lauren Davis’s new novel, The Empty Room (link is to the Kindle edition). Big crowd and high spirits (nice food, too, at Camillo’s Café in Princeton!). Bought a copy, so haven’t read it yet, but the early reviews predict a powerful story between those covers or on that screen. You know you’re in for a rough ride when a book starts, “It was Monday morning, and Colleen Kerrigan woke up wondering why she was chewing on a dirty sock.”

Lauren’s most recent book before this, Our Daily Bread (5 stars on Amazon), was named a “Best Book of the Year” by the Boston Globe and The Globe and Mail (Toronto), and it was longlisted for Canada’s 2012 Giller Prize. You can read more about Lauren and her popular “Sharpening the Quill” writers’ workshops here. She’s lived in Montreal and Paris, and thank goodness she’s here in Princeton now!

6-19-13 Mystery/Travel/Mystery

If you missed the hour-long PBS program with David Suchet (who played the quintessential Hercule Poirot) traveling the 2013 Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, watch for replays, see it on Hulu, or whatever you must do! The show combines the romance of train travel, hints of the classic Agatha Christie plot (Suchet: “Which compartment would Poirot actually have slept in?”), the thrill of every child who’s wanted to drive a train, beautiful scenery, and a heaping plate of luxury with Suchet’s charming narrative. He joins the train service in London’s Victoria Station, travels to the coast, and is ferried in a car impressive even by Rolls-Royce standards across the Channel to meet up with the modern, meticulously restored train cars of the original Orient Express. From there it takes him to Paris, Venice, and Prague. (No Istanbul, sadly. The producers must have been reading the news.) This inspiring program will have you checking your savings account balance well before the closing credits!

6-18-13 Dorothy Parker and the World of Excess

Dorothy Parker is best known for her sharp wit, a lot of which referred to her troublesome love-life (“It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard”) and for the light verse popular in her early years of publishing. But her poems were often shadowed by bitterness, as in “Anecdote”:

So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say.

She was friends with the literary giants of her time, lived with Gatsby excess on the largesse of her wealthy friends, suffered suicidal depressions and drank and drank. This remarkable biography tells her story superbly. Longer review in “Reading . . .”

6-17-13  The Woollen/Wollin/Wootin Family

Pieces of the quest to assemble my Edwards family genealogy got fitted into place over the past week. In the Eastern Shore of Maryland resort town of Cambridge, I spent one rainy day in the Dorchester County Historical Society museum and archive tracing the family of my great-great grandmother, ending up, as usual with more questions. Several well-sourced histories of the Woollen (that’s with two o’s and two l’s, or one of each or an “i” instead of the “e,” or a “t” instead of the “l’s”—or, as in the photo above!) family put their arrival in the county to the mid-1600’s, and thus among the first European settlers of the colony. They owned substantial farmland near Slaughter Creek. From Slaughter Creek, they moved to Troublesome Creek in North Carolina, and on to Hurricane Creek in Central Tennessee. No “Pleasant Creek” or “Sweetwater Creek” for these pioneers!

6-11 to 6-16-13 Getting Away From It All

As long as we’re both here, let me recommend imgembed–“the new standard for fair, online image use”–as a source for free photographs and artworks by hundreds of outstanding visual artists, like Christine Vaufrey (at left). Great graphics, great service, easy to use!

6-10-13 Open Dyslexic

Open Dyslexic is a new type face developed by designer Abelardo Gonzalez to help people with dyslexia read more easily. It’s available free to users. “The response has been great,” Abelardo told the BBC. “I’ve had people emailing saying this is the first time they could read text without it looking wiggly or has helped other symptoms of dyslexia.” The letters of Open Dyslexic are weighted at the bottom to help keep them “in place.” Now if someone would invent something that helped me learn right and left.

6-7-13 Word-Lovers’ Tool

The free online graphical dictionary Visuwords — not only provides the meaning of the word you’re looking up, but also displays how it relates to other words and concepts. The star-shaped associations with my “word of the day” (below right), abstemious, for example, shows synonyms, an antonym, and a derivative word. Color-coding reveals the part of speech, too. I frequently use Visual Thesaurus—a  similar site, but not as colorful, and which charges a modest fee—when I have a word on the tip of my tongue that I just can’t spit out onto the page. It’s easy to get caught in the neural nets these sites display, following the trail of associations from word to word.

6-5-13 Two Days, Two Great Plays

Last night I saw New Jersey Shakespeare Theatre’s production of The Playboy of the Western World, which opens its 2013 season, and it was very different from how I remembered the play, seen a decade ago at Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Shaw Festival. NJST drew out the comedic aspects of the story, which centers around an intruder on small-town Irish life a century or so ago, and, like all intruders, the man turns the locals upside down. He claims to have killed his father, which inspires their awe, and their fascinated attention brings him out of his shell. Some superb performances, and, while aspects of the story are perhaps dated, people have not really changed. Otherwise, why would the tabloid press waste so much ink on so many trainwreck “personalities.”

6-4-13 Present Laughter

Nice production of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter at Two River Theater Company in Red Bank this month. We went because we’re fans of Michael Cumpsty who played the lead—the aging matinee idol who can’t stop acting: “The only thing he can be faithful to is being center stage.” Lively direction by David Lee, winner of nine Emmys, co-creator of Frasier, and writer/producer for Cheers, who shared with the cast his impeccable sense of timing. Each scene started with a someone–a surprising someone at times–singing Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” (here’s Dinah Washington’s classic rendition). Another treat: actor Victor Garber (Argo, Milk) came to see the production—he played Cumpsty’s role on Broadway in 2010. I recognized him in a café across the street before the show.

6-3-13 San Francisco Travel Tips

In the Bay Area last week and have the following travel tips for you. An exotic hotel, a beautiful restaurant, a magical water excursion—all great settings to let the imagination roam and the mysteries of life to play out.

Where to stay: I love Hotel Kabuki in Japantown. It’s a healthy, but not disastrously uphill walk to Union Square, Chinatown, the financial district, and it’s adjacent to the Japantown mall and near Fillmore Street shopping. Its small feel belies the 218 rooms with charming Japanese décor. The staff is great! Look for special packages.

Where to eat: Dinner at Farallon is a must-do splurge whenever I’m in San Francisco. The dining room is beautiful, with the sea-creature lighting fixtures, and the food is outstanding. Named for the Farallon Islands, 30 miles off the Golden Gate, seafood is naturally the specialty. Fabulous.

What not to miss: San Francisco has a new water taxi, Tideline, which uses the same type boat as the New Zealand Coast Guard. In addition to regular water taxi service, Tideline offers night-time tours of the bay for a perfect view of the artist-created LED display on the Bay Bridge (video link). Out on the water, you get a whole new view of this gorgeous city.

5-24-13 The Other Son

Four stars for the 2012 French drama The Other Son (trailer), a switched-at-birth tale of two young men, one Israeli and one Palestinian. What could have devolved into shallow sentimentality is instead elevated to a thought-provoking and intense examination of relationships and identity. The acting is superb, as the characters grasp for shards of pleasure in an excruciating situation they must come to terms with. The casting of the two sons added visual plausibility to the dilemma, as well. Thanks, Netflix! For real, this time.

5-22-13 Gods and Generals

Haven’t seen the Civil War epic, Gods and Generals? I’m about to save you a Netflix pick and some time. Or, maybe not, if you do the better thing and pick up the Jeff Shaara book. He, too, was disappointed in this movie, even though it involved the same team—and some of the same cast—that produced the much better The Killer Angels, based on his father Michael Shaara’s book about Gettysburg. Gods and Generals is told almost entirely from the self-justifying southern point of view, an odd, long Hollywood tradition, dating at least to Gone with the Wind (with Glory, a refreshing exception). The South’s discredited arguments for war are repeatedly trotted out by the movie’s main character, Stonewall Jackson; the black actors are given cringe-worthy lines; and the women were amiable simps. If all that weren’t more than enough of a turn-off, the men looked like they had stuffed animals glued to their chins. Oh, and, Ted Turner, who funded the entire production, appears in a cameo, singing.

5-20-13 Into the Woods

McCarter Theatre’s well-reviewed production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods has been extended a week, so tickets are still available. As freshly reimagined by Fiasco Theater, the production is stripped down to bare the musical’s essential messages of human interconnectedness. The young cast was terrific and energetic throughout, and the set and staging magical—most appropriate for a musical based on the interweaving of classic fairy tales. It appears the costume director spent a fair amount of time on etsy, to good effect. If you’re in the area, don’t miss it!

5-17-13 A Royal Affair

In A Royal Affair, beautiful young queen Caroline spurns her deranged husband and has an affair with her husband’s personal physician and chief adviser, who nightly sneaks through a kitchen full of servants and up the back stairs to her chamber. What can go wrong? Haven’t they seen the movie? Nope, this is Denmark in the late 1700’s, when King Christian VII, a few smorgas short of a bord, begins to hang with Johann Friedrich Streunsee (Mads Mikkelson), an ardent believer in the Enlightenment and other stuff that scandalizes the Danish aristocracy. My in-house historian, Wikipedia, says the movie was pretty darn accurate. You know how it ends; it’s the ride that counts.

5-15-13 Amazing . . . Inspiring

If I only had that 3-D printer, I could make myself a new see-through dress like the one on the cover of Metropolis’s April issue by designer Iris van Herpern. Click on her name and prepare to be amazed at the photos of her work. Sci-fi writers take note: some awesome costume ideas here!

For a totally different kind of inspiration, Metropolis’s May issue describes how the high-end Italian faucet manufacturer Fantini will be using all the 2013 profits from one of its popular faucet lines (the I Balocchi, pictured below, and available in pretty much any color) to provide ready access to water for the people of Masango, Burundi. Nice tie-in, people.

5-13-13   42

Highly recommend the new Jackie Robinson biopic, 42 (trailer). The acting is excellent, very believable. Chadwick Boseman as Robinson, Nicole Beharie as his wife Rachel, and Harrison Ford delighting in the role of gruff-voiced Branch Rickey. Yes, we know how the story ends, but reliving the courage of Robinson to stand up to the catcalls, snubs, and physical abuse on the field is so restorative amid the antiheroes and hollow manufactured conflicts that characterize so many movies. The script avoids most of the sports-movie clichés, too. One good exchange—when Rickey is asking whether Robinson will be able to hold his temper when people go after him, as expected—goes something like this: JR: “Don’t you want a man who has the courage to stand up for himself?” BR: “I want a man who has the courage not to. The courage to turn the other cheek.” Great job all around. Love the 1940’s wheels, too!

5-10-13 Le Carré x 2

On May 1, guest news poster David Ludlum reported on the New York Times’s laudatory profile of spy novelist John le Carré, published just before release of the author’s new novel, A Delicate Truth, which involves a corrupt member of the British Parliament, American corporate mercenaries, a tea party financier, Al Qaeda . . . Then the Times’s reviewers warmed up. “Ponderous, heavy-handed and obvious,” said Michiko Kakutani, followed by fellow spy novelist Olen Steinhauer, who says “the narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision.” These dueling opinions are almost as entertaining as the April 15 New Yorker article by le Carré himself, describing his experience as a new author (age 34) running shuttle diplomacy between actor Richard Burton and director Martin Ritt, who were on desperately shaky terms during filming of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in the mid-1960s. (One tidbit: The name of the novel’s female victim, Liz, was changed to Nan, in deference to Burton’s new wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who might at any time motor onto the movie lot unannounced in her white Rolls-Royce.)

Thanks to guest news poster David Ludlum. His earlier post is in The Morgue.

5-8-13 Top Southwest Travel Tips – Phoenix, Tucson, Sedona, Southern Utah

What to see (Phoenix):  The Musical Instrument Museum – “the most extraordinary museum you’ll ever hear.” Architecturally beautiful, much of the museum is organized by geographic area, so you can see the instruments, maybe learn how they are made, hear them being played in concert and village settings. A feast for eyes and ears! Find the instruments that your grandparents and great-grandparents played back in the home country—almost 200 of which are represented in this fascinating and beautifully presented collection.

Where to stay (Tucson):  The Tucson estate of cosmetics maven Merle Norman has been converted into a b&b, The Inns at El Rancho Merlita. Wildlife (hummingbirds and javelinas at the same time!), beautiful surroundings (pictured above), charming rooms, large saltwater pool, and real Old West public spaces. Memorable, and I wish I were there right now!

Where to eat (Sedona): No doubt there are many great places, but my dinners at the Heartline Café (chat with the bartender, who looks like Duke Ellington) and Cucina Rustica were excellent.

Zion and Bryce (Utah): If you want to stay in the lodges, originally built by the railroads to entice people to experience rail travel, you’ll need to book a year ahead. They’ve upped their food service game, though at Zion, nearby Springdale offers additional options. Take all the ranger tours you can. The rangers (and some volunteers) are well-informed, interested, and interesting. If there’s a stargazing night at Bryce, don’t miss it! Awesome night heavens, rapidly disappearing.

5-7-13 Travel Haps and Mishaps

So, I went into the ladies room of a fancy restaurant, a converted closet–and a small one at that–in the old house the restaurant used to be, and on the floor was a sizable packet of bills, with a $1 on the outside. They may all have been $1s, I don’t know, I didn’t count. From my seat at the table I had a good view of the ladies room door and knew who had been in there before me. When I came out, I spotted her at her table, chatting with a large group of friends. I walked up behind her, showed her the money discreetly, and said, “I think you left this in the ladies.” She hadn’t realized the money was missing and launched into a convoluted explanation before taking it back. A thank-you would have been nice.

5-6-13 Edgar Award Winners

Mystery Writers of America has selected winners of this year’s prestigious Edgar Awards for best mystery writing in various categories, assessed recently in the New York Times. The links below let you sample the winners’ first few pages. (The Morgue entry for 3/1 – 3/4, 2013, contains the full list of nominees in top categories.) Crime and mystery fiction continues to be enormously popular, so the competition is fierce. There are dozens of awards programs for the genre, only some of which are listed here, and what’s interesting is how little overlap exists among winners, which suggests there are as many ways to catch a reader as there are to catch a criminal.

Novel: Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

Best First Novel: The Expats by Chris Pavone – My review is in the Reading . . . list (audio book) on this website.

Best Paperback Original: The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters

Best Fact Crime: Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French

5-3-13 On the Road Again

My recent southwest trip—Scottsdale, Tucson, Sedona, Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks produced lots of great memories and travel tips forthcoming from my alter ego, Eugenia Clarke. But for now:

  • Most memorable bumper sticker: “I’ll start believing corporations are people when Texas executes one”
  • Least enticing furniture store name: My Pig Sty
  • Best star-gazing: Bryce Canyon (in 25 years light pollution will be so bad that children will never see the Milky Way; Bryce is one of the few truly dark places left in the lower 48)
  • The Route 66 Diner Experience: Mr. D’z in Kingman, Arizona (now sing along – “Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino”) – and great address, too — 105 Andy Devine Avenue.

5-1-13 The Enduring Spymaster

The New York Times Magazine’s recent article on John le Carré—who has done as much as anyone to create the popular conception of spies and spycraft—came out just ahead of the release of his 23rd novel, A Delicate Truth, on May 7. The magazine calls the new book an indictment of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess, and the corporatization of warfare. Le Carré is having a “late-career bloom,” its report says, with movie adaptations of his 2008 and 2010 novels A Most Wanted Man (Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Willem Defoe) and Our Kind of Traitor (Ewan McGregor, Mads Mikkelsen, Ralph Fiennes) to follow last year’s successful Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s a praiseful piece that characterizes le Carré’s books as less about espionage than human frailty and desire, and how we are all spies of a sort. At 81 years old, he’s begun another novel he describes as loosely based on a Joseph Conrad story that “he’d like to translate into espionage terms.”

Guest news poster: David Ludlum

4-15-13 On Vacation 

See you again in May. meanwhile, enjoy this very short story, Windjammer.

Or check the morgue for stories and reviews you may have missed. Happy Spring!

4-13-13  Dreary Winter’s Tale

Saw The Winter’s Tale at McCarter Theatre last night, fully prepared to enjoy it. It received great reviews in the local paper, which is a pretty reliable guide. The only explanation is that the reviewer saw some other play. Director Rebecca Taichman’s Twelfth Night a few seasons ago was marvelous, in the literal sense that it was a marvel. This production was a big disappointment. One part was badly cast, one actress was badly miked, and unless facing the audience, she was unintelligible. Shakespeare in modern dress never lets the actors move quite right. Staging is reportedly very important to Taichman, and a lot of those decisions careened between puzzling and too obvious. Big butterflies wafting across the stage—“transformation.” Today I’m making part of the cast’s dinner for tonite and will get to meet all of them. Will have to trot out my diplomacy skills, such as they are.

4-12-13 Cliodynamics & You

Poor Clio, Muse of History, here ready to record our vital events only to discover that the mathematicians have beaten her to it. Naming their new field “cliodynamics,” a slap in her pretty face if there ever was one, a number of theorists are analyzing history in search of patterns that may suggest the future, resurrecting the idea of historical cycles and dusting it off with a stiff brush of Big Data—in this case, big old data, and since 2010, they’ve had their own peer-reviewed journal, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. A recent Wired story by Klint Finley describes one recent prediction: “Unless something changes . . . we’re due for a wave of widespread violence in about 2020, including riots and terrorism.” This prediction is based on regular waves of social instability in many cultures over many eras, including in the United States. One cliodynamicist attributes this instability to “elite overproduction” and growing social inequality—something increasingly apparent in the United States, all right. (A past Wired article sounds the obligatory Big Data cautionary note.) Looks like all those writers of dystopian futures can find their ideas in our current economic news.

4-11-13 Retweet Data

A cute little app from RetweetLab.com will give you more information than you know what to do with regarding retweets from your Twitter stream. I ran my Twitter ID @vsk8s through the app and found out which day of the week I get the most retweets (Friday, by far), hour of the day (2 pm), retweet length (almost a tie between 30 and 120 characters), the reading grade level of my retweeted items (12th grade, though my average reading grade level is 4.13). Lots more information, too: most retweetable words (in my case “go!”), sentiment (?), capitalization percentage, links, and so on. The data bear out my absentmindedness, too. Some 57 percent of my tweets lack hashtags. Have fun with it.

4-10-13 Frommer Buys Its Brand Back

Travelers were shocked when Google decided to suspend publication of Arthur Frommer’s popular guidebooks. While travel costs have risen from the thrilling $5 a day promise of Frommer’s early career, and mobile technologies are lighter in the backpack or pocket than the thick, information-packed paperbacks of yore, there’s something reassuring about consulting a source that is obsessively updated. Now Frommer has reacquired the rights to the brand and plans to continue normal publication. Meanwhile, Google says that it has integrated content from the books into its various services. OK, if stranded travelers are OK with 2012 information!

4-9-13 Leonard Cohen

Sunday Night . . . Leonard Cohen . . . Radio City Music Hall . . . Fantastic concert of early, mid, late Cohen songs in his “old ideas” tour (Great review, pix, and video). Despite his age (78), he and his band thrilled wildly enthusiastic audience of several generations. The enigmatic lyrics, the deep voice that occasionally dips down as if to pull up his socks, the generosity of spirit—a great experience. Javier Mas on the Spanish guitar (listen!) and Alexandru Bublitchi on violin were awesome. Really, all the band members (6) and female singers (3) were. He spent an inordinate time on his knees on the rug-padded stage, perhaps a concession to age and not wanting to perch on a stool like Dean Martin, but perfectly in sync with the role of supplicant that permeates so many of his songs. Or, perhaps he’s always done this? Among the sly allusions to his age and dark spirit was his recounting a conversation with his hotel mirror, which advised, “Lighten up, Leonard. And, really, what shift in the great cosmos is required to please you?” Love my new Pandora “Leonard Cohen” station. Hallelujah!

4-8-13 Free Science at Last?

Ever wanted to look up the details on some health or science story, feeling virtuous that you’re tracking down the original source and not just relying on some second- or third-hand report? Then, icy water in your face, you find out that reading that original article will cost you a cool $35. Occasionally, you can find a lucky backdoor to get it, and sometimes you discover it was published in an open access journal like PLOS. But usually, not. According to a recent Nature special edition, scientific publishers are starting to think more seriously about online open access, to save print costs, meet authors’ institutional requirements, and respond to increasingly restive researchers. Already they’ve circumvented the problem of leisurely lead times from acceptance of an article to its appearance in print with “first online” publication. Maybe the doors to knowledge will fling open soon!

4-6-13 Hutong Hip

According to the Washington Post, some of Beijing’s old hutongs not only survive, they are becoming hip! Many of the hutongs—intimate back alleys of tiny noodle shops, cheap dwellings carved from former courtyard mansions, and neighborhood street life—were pulled down in preparation for the Olympics. A reminder of Old China that’s romantic to anyone who doesn’t live there and familiar to readers (like me!) of A Dream of Red Mansions and the Tang Dynasty walled cities administered by master detective Judge Dee Gong An. Judge Dee’s adventures (he was a real-life character) were expertly told by former Dutch diplomat Robert Van Gulik. Mysteries well worth picking up, if you haven’t read any. Thus the attraction of the hutongs. As the Post’s Chaney Kwak says, “isn’t the real allure of travel the possibility of being transported to an unexpected universe at a moment’s notice?”

4-4-13 Korean Ghosts

An early April lecture on recent Korean history emphasized reasons for North Korean leaders’ strange, counterproductive-seeming bellicosity, which Rutgers history professor Suzy Kim believes U.S. leaders do not understand very well. Americans have mostly forgotten the Korean War, but because it ended not with a peace treaty, but with an armistice, in North Korean minds, they are still in a state of war. At the end of that war, which leveled many cities, Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe provided technical help and funds to rebuild them from scratch. Meanwhile, many of its military resources remain hidden underground, where they retreated to avoid U.S. bombs. When Korea was hit in the 1990s by a succession of catastrophes, the Soviet Union was gone, and little help came. Worst were the devastating floods and ensuing famine from 1994-98—in one episode, 18 inches of rain fell in a single day. The country’s motto is “Juche,” which in its simplest meaning is “self-reliance.” Sixty years of bunker mentality does strange things to the collective psyche.

4-2-13 Crowd-Sourced Travel Ideas

In January, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a new site—Wikivoyage—which aims to be a rich worldwide travel guide created and edited, like Wikipedia, by you and me. Already it boasts more than 24,000 articles in English. You can search by continent, country, and city or by topic—general travel information, like accommodations, activities, cultural activities, transportation, or travel tips for a specific region or interest, such as “Polish narrow gauge railways.” The destination of the month is Guadalajara, and the featured travel topic is “Baseball in the United States.” A great place to browse and, of course contribute! The site’s “star articles” give a sense of the quality being sought. Lots of star articles on San Francisco, D.C., Chicago. Check it out.

4-1-13 Roundelay: A Comedy

R.N. Sandberg’s new play, Roundelay: A Comedy, from the Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, N.J., is a whirlwind of romance—romances, more accurately, across cultures, countries, and genders. It’s lively fun, exploring the possibility of love in its many permutations, the recurrent roundelay of life. The New York Times review—this is a tiny theatre—rightly praises the six actors and lightning-quick directing of the many short scenes. A dialect coach guided four of the actors who play two parts, one American and one Indian, Nigerian, or Puerto Rican, to credible accents. So credibly do they change their accents and personas that more than one audience member has asked, “Why didn’t the rest of the cast take a bow?”

3-30-13 “Beam Me Up, Scotty”

With six weeks to wait until release of the new Star Trek movie, Into Darkness, and two years to wait for the next Star Wars episode, there’s a few nanoseconds to reflect on how the world has changed since the beginning of these two mind-stretching franchises. And whether the fascination of three generations of fans, who grew up to be engineers and computer geeks, inspired some of these changes. See how far we’ve come on a website demonstrating Star Trek technologies that came true. The video there has a really, really annoying narratrix, and the producers made the mistake of including Bing, but the commenters called them on it at warp speed. Or, delve into 10 Star Wars technologies we actually want, led by a wish for R2-D2 and C-3PO. Yet another site has the temerity to list technologies that will “never exist.”  No light sabers, no “Beam me up”? By the time the opening credits for Star Wars 25 roll onto your mind-screen, who knows?

3-29-13 Happy/Sad Talk

“If you find you’re crying less while reading and throwing fewer books across the room, there may be a good reason,” said New York Times Artsbeat blogger Jennifer Schuessler in a column last Sunday. A new study of the content of 20th century English-language books has found they are using fewer and fewer emotional words suggesting anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. This holds true for fiction as well as all books. (Cheeringly, their analytic tool—Google’s Ngram database—looked for 115 word stems connoting sadness, but 224 associated with joy.) The only one of these categories where usage increased was fear, and periods with relatively more “sad” or “happy” words track with broader societal events. The overall decline in emotion-linked words might be linked to decades of writing advice to “show, not tell.” Under this dictum, you don’t write “Janet was sad,” you write “Janet drooped in her chair like a rain-soaked willow”; you don’t write “Ted let his anger show,” you write, “Ted pulled his arm back and punched a hole through the freshly painted drywall.” Computerized content analysis may not be sophisticated enough yet to parse those emotions, but readers are.

3-28-13 Moon Shining

The big moon brightening the sky the last few nights is a teaser for what’s coming out of George Washington’s Mt. Vernon next month—whiskey! Unaged whiskey at that, which sounds a lot like the output of that giant white orb in the sky. According to the Washington Post, in 1799, George Washington sent his nephew an important message: “‘Two hundred gallons of Whiskey will be ready this day for your call, and the sooner it is taken the better, as the demand for this article (in these parts) is brisk.’” Mt. Vernon historians—with a former Maker’s Mark master distiller in the lead—are recreating our first President’s unaged rye whiskey, using locally grown grain, his recipe, and his methods. 1,100 bottles of the stuff go on sale at 10 a.m. April 4–$95 a pop, with a waiting list of more than 4,000. Brisk demand, indeed.  And, courtesy of NPR, see “The Wonderful World of Whisky Art!”

3-27-13 Judging the Book Covers

For its slide show feature on notable book covers, the New York Times asked graphic designers to suggest and comment on one of their favorites from last year. The result is 19 designs of varying complexity and graphic punch. Some made the case for absolute simplicity, and some the exact opposite. Oddly, not many would prompt me to grab the book from B&N’s “New Releases” table. My favorites were #2 (The Flame Alphabet), #11 (Watergate), with its die-cut telephone receiver holes hiding a bug printed underneath, on the book’s cover, and #17 (I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tale). Kirkus describes that whole book as a “visual stunner.” One designer’s awe-struck comment about the cover for Building Stories, the one he chose (pictured right), is “What the heck is it?”

3-26-13 Italian Justice Strikes Again

A few years ago, wanting to learn how the Italian judicial system worked, I picked up The Monster of Florence, about a serial killer who haunted the lovers’ lanes around Florence for almost 20 years. Here’s how the judicial system worked: the prosecutor would arrest a suspect on the flimsiest evidence or hints, jail him (maybe with a trial, maybe not) until another of the distinctive double-slayings occurred, then let him go. An epilogue mentioned that this same prosecutor was assigned to the case of Amanda Knox, the American student accused of the 2007 murder of her British roommate in Perugia. That was a big “uh-oh,” and I followed the case closely afterward. Nina Burleigh’s The Fatal Gift of Beauty expertly replays the horrors of that prosecution. It took four years to pry Amanda and her former boyfriend out of the Italian prison system, but their conviction was reversed in 2011 because there was no credible motive and no physical evidence against them. They were still at risk from a prosecutorial appeal, and today, unbelievably, Italy’s supreme court reversed the acquittal, ordering a new trial.

5-4-13 Update: Frank Bruni’s NYTimes op-ed “Sexism and the Single Murderess”

3-25-13 The End of PiNOchet

The movie No mixes real-life footage of the last days of Chile’s Pinochet regime with similarly jumpy, overexposed new footage to create a fictional piece that feels like a documentary. No focuses on the creation of an ad campaign that helped bring down the dictator’s brutal dictatorship, but Chilean politicos quickly pointed out the film’s oversimplifications, says the New York Times. In 1988, Chile’s normally apathetic voters, convinced change was impossible, were nonetheless persuaded to register to vote and to cast their ballots in a plebiscite on whether or no to keep the repressive dictator. Their answer was “no.” The film leaves out the registration drive and other activities, focusing instead on the dueling ad campaigns. Gael García Bernathe stars as an apolitical advertising strategist who inspires much of the No campaign despite opposition from all sides. Dramatic, well acted, and totally deserving of its Oscar nomination and its many positive reviews, even if it isn’t a soup-to-nuts manual on how to oust repressive regimes.

3-23-13 Downton Abbey: The Spinoffs

It’s downtime for Downton, but publishers are betting they can feed our craving (some of the pleasure of which faded with last season’s unimaginative finale, IMHO) with a spate of new books featuring luxurious manor houses, where people dress for dinner and social rules are made to be broken. Regina small writes about 10 of these titles in the April issue of RT Book Reviews. You might try:

  • Summerset Abbey (shameless!) – three young independent-thinking women living in an opulent mansion outside London, c. 1913. Two books in this series available so far. Author T.J.Brown’s thoughts on “researching the Downton Abbey lifestyle.”
  • The Last Summer – It’s 1914, and Clarissa Granville, almost 17, falls for the housekeeper’s son, soon sent to France to fight. Has that upstairs-downstairs thing. The Sunday Times of London calls it a “sumptuous, absorbing tale.”
  • Habits of the House and Long Live the King (forthcoming) – 1899 . . . Lord Dilberne . . . financially troubled estate . . . two willful children. These are the first two books in a planned trilogy by Fay Weldon who wrote the first episode of the original Upstairs, Downstairs so long ago.
  • While We Were Watching Downton Abbey – set in contemporary Atlanta, a group of apartment building residents gathers weekly to watch Downton, “a shared passion that could change their lives.” Wendy Wax’s book is coming April 2.

3-22-13  You Can’t Make this Stuff Up!

As a mystery/thriller writer, I’d be challenged to develop a character who was a hard-working movie star conscientiously finishing up filming before heading to prison on an illegal weapons conviction. It turns out that life has supplied the real thing in the form of Indian actor Sanjay Dutt. Dutt is determined to finish the four films he’s working on in the next month, before starting a three and a half year sentence recently reinstated by the Indian Supreme Court. He was caught up with the gangsters who organized the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings—13 bombs in a two-hour period—in  which almost a thousand people were killed or injured. When he was first out on bail almost 20 years ago, he had to be in court in the daytime, so, according to a friend, “he shot his films in the night for nearly a year-and-a-half.” The sacrifices people make for their art!

3-21-13 400 Million Daily Tweets!

Twitter turns seven today, and to celebrate, the Twitter gods have released this “greatest hits” video. Also see the Twitter page spotlighting creative use of the medium by writers, journalists, entertainers and actual influential people. You’ll find Jennifer Egan’s short story “Black Box” in tweets, read about crime control, direct from FBI’s mouth, how Twitter reports the news and debunks rumors, and the Harry Potter characters commenting on J.K. Rowling’s new book.

3-20-13 Quick Check-out

Here’s a story that surely would catch Eugenia Clarke’s eye. The BBC reports that a hotel manager accused of sexually harassing a British tourist who jumped from a hotel balcony to escape him yesterday has appeared in a local magistrate’s court to deny the charge. The 31-year-old woman, a dentist, received a head injury and hairline fractures in both legs in the fall; she will make her statement in court later today. She told police she had asked for an early-morning wake-up call “and was offered a massage by the hotel owner when he knocked on her door.” He says he was only trying to wake her. This possible excess of hospitality occurred in the Indian city of Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. Actually, women visiting India have recently been advised to be careful and avoid traveling alone, as reported cases of sexual attack have been rising and after the occurrence of several notorious sexual assaults. Eugenia Clarke is a fictional U.S. travel writer whose advice is gold.

3-19-13 Amazing Crime Breakthrough

FBI officials announced yesterday that they know the identities of the thieves who on St. Patrick’s Day night 23 years ago overpowered the guards at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and walked out with $500 million in paintings and other art—still the largest property crime in U.S. history. The frames the thieves left behind have stood empty ever since. The case has thwarted many, many Boston and federal agents, private eyes, art security experts, amateur sleuths, and journalists—frustrating and fascinating them in equal measure. Now the FBI says it was the work of an East Coast “criminal organization.” Really? (I have my own novel theory, but no one has asked.) Authorities hoped an informant would come forward after the statute of limitations on the theft ran out, but no such luck. As with all art heists, the theft was relatively easy, the tricky part is getting rid of the stuff. The FBI says the art was transported to the Connecticut and Philadelphia regions, but do not know precisely where it is, so they are asking the public for help—and still offering a $5 million reward. It will be fascinating to learn whether this announcement is for real, but meanwhile, the Gardner just wants its art back.

3-18-13 “One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter”

Saw the amazing documentary, The Gatekeepers, yesterday. It reviews the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes and words of all six surviving directors of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency. Old footage of the Six-Day War in 1968—after which Israel annexed the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza—and subsequent events—the bus bombings, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the intifadas, pinpoint bombings of Palestinian targets, meetings brokered by President Clinton—all roll on hopelessly toward the present stalemate. To a man, these former spy chiefs, who have studied the Israeli security situation closer than anyone else, believe the hardline strategy has been a mistake, that fighting when Israel should have been working for peace has made the country less safe, not more. Continued saber-rattling takes its toll on every one of them, and their childhood dreams of a peaceful Israel have turned into a nightmare for everyone, Israeli and Palestinian alike. With President Obama in Israel this week, this line from the New York Times review is especially apt. “It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.”

3-16-13 Revolutionary Information

Spent the morning at the David Library of the American Revolution—a unique repository, located in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. Christmas 1776 Washington’s exhausted troops camped in that area, prior to crossing the Delaware River for the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, which turned the tide of the War. The library’s collection covers the critical 50 years from the French and Indian War through the post-Revolutionary period, or approximately 1800. It’s a treasure-trove for scholars, as well as for amateur genealogists like me! The library is deemed “a national treasure of the first rank,” according to noted historian David McCullough, “a window on our founding times like no other.”

3-15-13 Home Invention

The backlash against mass production and the development of sophisticated milling machines, 3-D printers, and other cool tools easily accommodated in a garage or small shop has led to a resurgence in do-it-yourself manufacturing (and new ways of making art). To support such small endeavors, along comes a set of overdue reforms to U.S. patent law, which will bring our policies more in line with those of other nations. In a Wired article, Nathan Hurst explains how the new law, going into effect tomorrow, overcomes a big hurdle for the small guy. Now the first inventor to file a patent will have the right to it; previously, patent protection went to the person (company) who claimed to have invented it first. Such claims led, inevitably, to costly litigation a solo inventor rarely could afford.

3-14-12 Drawing a Blank

Want to get quickly out of the gate with a new short story? Check out the quarterly literary journal The First Line. The editors provide the first sentence and you take it from there, anything from 300 to 3,000-or-so words. They consider their approach “an exercise in creativity for writers and a chance for readers to see how many different directions we can take when we start from the same place.” A friend of mine submitted a story for the Spring 2013 issue and was accepted—“one of the rare instances of near-instant gratification in the literary world,” she says. She submitted the piece on February 1 (the deadline) and heard back 10 days later, with the publication available in pdf a mere month after that. Submission guidelines are at the link above, and here are the journal’s next two opening lines:

Summer:
I started collecting secrets when I was just six years old.
Due date: May 1, 2013

Fall:
There must have been thousands standing in the rain that day.*
Due date: August 1, 2013

*How many of these fall entries will be set in St. Peter’s Square?

3-13-13 Where is Yemen Anyway?

Former Yemen Ambassador Barbara Bodine said last night that at the beginning of each academic each year she challenges her Princeton students by giving them a blank map of the Middle East and asking them to fill in the country names.Yemen is one of the countries they rarely can identify. It’s at the foot of the Arabian peninsula, and in the 1960’s, its port city of Aden was one of the busiest in the world. Unlike its neighbors, Yemen has no oil. It has no fresh water (alas, no salmon fishing). The capital is in the mountains, 7000 feet above sea level, so “almost no oxygen,” Bodine said. Sixty percent of the population is under age 20. In many ways, it is a disaster waiting to happen “that never does.” So it will be especially interesting to watch progress of the National Dialog coming up later this month—an important step on the Yemenis long road to a new government, which started with the “Arab Upheaval,” the term she prefers. Many issues could derail this process, but she admires the Yemenis’ determination to create a better government for themselves.

3-12-13  Refresh

Alex Mar in Sunday’s New York Times talks about the changing world of writers’ colonies—places writers used to go to get away from it all, buckle down free of everyday distractions, and get the damn book written. Not so much any more. Spending a month in New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony, he was cooking, churning out page after page—until he discovered that if he stood in a far corner of his cabin’s front porch his iPhone had 3G access. The world invaded like a tsunami. These days, the notion of “getting away from it all” seems a quaint relic. We mostly don’t want to disconnect and, increasingly, we can’t. But attention, like time, is limited. Junot Díaz says that when he fell off the “No Facebook” wagon, he went from reading a book a week to a book a month. The word “refresh” means more than updating the screen in front of us. It applies to what’s inside, too. How do you clear some mind-space?

3-11-13 What Your Favorite Writers Read

A welcome Internet find for readers in all genres is London-based Five Books. The site covers dozens of topics, from the specific, like World War II, to the general, like Natural History. In each topic, the site posts interviews with leading authors, who talk about their work and recommend five books they believe are essential in their category. I gravitated to the mystery/thriller category and found writers like Scott Turow—who says of the legal novels he picked, “I think they’re a pretty round portrait of the problems of the law, the kind of human mess that it tries unsuccessfully to make sense of”—as well as Lynda La Plante on crime novels (she wrote the Prime Suspect TV series) and Tess Gerritson on favorite thrillers. Several snow-plowed into Scandinavian crime-writing. And so on. There’s a non-fiction espionage section, too, which includes interviews with authors who write about spies, MI6, the FBI, and the like. With its impressive range of topics, Five Books has something for every reader, from Woody Allen on Inspiration to Ian McEwan on the novels that have shaped his own.

3-9-13 Cold Facts

In and out of bed the last two days with a bad cold, I’ve used the time to find out a few things. Since you start to get cold symptoms two or three days after exposure to the virus, I’ve identified my chief suspects, at left:

Seeking more useful information than “wait it out,” I ran across a list of cold myths. The last on the list—“feed a cold and starve a fever”—is a common misstatement. A friend once explained that the correct advice is “feed a cold and drown a fever.”

Here are some exciting cold remedies and pastimes to deploy in your weakened condition:

Drowning assistance: recipe for Dr. Pat’s Hot Toddy Cold Remedy

Intellectual stimulation: Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen (or wait for the TV Series)

Too demanding? There’s TV (Cold Cases). And more TV (“cold starts” from Breaking Bad)

In my pale hand, ginger tea (how to brew)

Keeping busy, or, “you too can make Kleenex flowers!”

And, of course, plenty of rest in your spartan bed.

3-8-13 Driving Brits Up the Wall

Most amused by a feature on BBC America, “10 Things Americans Do that Drive Brits Nuts” in its A Brit’s Guide to Surviving America feature. Naturally, some of these things drive other Americans nuts, too! Looking at this behavior from a foreigner’s point of view, we can see it and laugh—or shake our heads—at ourselves. Here is a portion of the Brit list. It drives them crazy when: we say “I love your accent!”; wait staff take the plates away too soon; we display over-zealous patriotism; treat pets like people (any Facebook user is familiar with this one, though I note for the record that my cats definitely are people); and we show relentlessly sincere cheer. On the last point, one of the comments from an American is right on, noting “If you think we’re too nice, then you should stay away from Canada, they have even more cheer than us.” And another commenter perhaps expressed it best, saying the U.K. and the U.S. “are foreign countries to each other.” Don’t let the common (sort of) language fool you!

3-7-12 End of Watch

Netflixed last fall’s LA cop thriller End of Watch this week (trailer). This movie barely touched down in theatres here, though reviews were good. It’s hard for a film to present a startling new insight into cops chasing bad guys and drug dealers, but the acting is tops, and the relationship between the two patrolmen cruising in their black-and-white (Jake Gyllenhaal & Michael Peña) is teasing, very “got your back,” totally convincing. These two guys know each other. Anna Kendrick does a fine job as Jake’s girl. The device of Gyllenhaal’s character filming parts of the cops’ daily routine persuasively suggests you’re seeing events through their eyes. Some of the handheld camera work might have been a little dizzying on the multiplex screen. I recommend it for fellow fans of The Wire, but warn the faint-hearted: If there were a tv app to eliminate the word f***, this would be a near-silent movie.

3-6-13 Word Weeding

Accomplished fiction author William Luvaas begins his current essay in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin # 74 with the Thomas Mann quote, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Writers, he says, “usually spend more time revising and editing than composing.” “Word-weeding,” he calls it. Which is what makes non-writers’ frequent question—“Is your book done yet?” so puzzling. What is “done” in this context? Except that, at some point, you must stop. “For the true wordsmith,” Luvaas says, “doubt (and the fastidiousness it inspires) is not an obsessive-compulsive disorder but a virtue.” He counsels never giving up on a narrative, but keeping it around until, one day, you see how to save it. Last year, I turned a third-person short story into a first-person one—a miraculous improvement. (It was published, too. Another miracle.) Admitting to yourself that you can’t get it right in the first draft (or the tenth or the twelfth), keeps you out of the swamp of premature perfectionism. As Luvaas advises, “First get it written, then get it right!”

3-5-13 Paco Peña

Saw the amazing Paco Peña Flamenco Ensemble at McCarter recently, sitting in the front row and surrounded by my flamenco friends and our fabulous instructor Lisa Solea. If this tour comes to your area, be sure to see it. The troupe includes Andalucian Peña and his remarkable guitar-playing, two additional talented guitarists and a percussionist who looks like he’s just sitting on an old carton, until his solo, when you hear how many sounds that box can make. Two cantadores—a man and a woman—provide the impassioned singing. And the dancers! Angel Muñoz, Charo Espino, and Daniela Tugues are well know in the flamenco dance world, especially the first two, who are husband-and-wife. Tugues was inadvertently the most amazing on the night I saw her, because during most of a lengthy solo, her left shoe was untied. I don’t know how she kept that shoe from flying into the audience. Difficult and distracting! In one number—a little short on choreography, but long on spectacle—the women wore white skirts with yellow and orange underskirts that looked like daffodils as they whirled and manipulated their costumes (above).

3-1 to 3-4-13 The Year’s Best Mysteries

The Mystery Writers of America recently announced nominees for the 2013 Edgar Awards–with the awardees to be revealed May 2 in New York. Below are the nominees in leading categories. The full list, which includes short stories and True Crime, Juvenile Young Adult, and teleplay categories, is on the MWA website.

Novel: The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins; The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye; Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn; Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman; Sunset by Al Lamanda; Live by Night by Dennis Lehane; All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley

Best First Novel: The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay; Don’t Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman; Mr. Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal; The Expats by Chris Pavone;
The 500 by Matthew Quirk; Black Fridays by Michael Sears

Best Paperback Original: Complication by Isaac Adamson; Whiplash River by Lou Berney; Bloodland by Alan Glynn; Blessed are the Dead by Malla Nunn; The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters

2-28-13 Need a New Car? Just Print One!

Jim Kor’s dreams of a “light, cheap and highly efficient” automobile, manufactured not out of steel, aluminum, and chrome, but created one plastic microlayer at a time with a 3-D printer (see the process) is coming closer to reality. A Wired article by Alexander George, complete with  gorgeous pictures, describes the process of building the car, called the Urbee 2, which would maximize gasoline mileage by being ultralight—1,200 pounds—and super-aerodynamic and by using an electric engine around town and diesel on the highway. Did he say highway? The three-wheel, two passenger vehicle has a tubular metal cage around the driver, and Kor maintains the bumpers will be as strong as their sheet-metal equivalents (aren’t all bumpers plastic these days?). Safety testing to come. Meanwhile, the Urbee 2 looks really cool.

2-27-13 Cities Key in Global Warming

The always-interesting Karrie Jacobs column in February’s Metropolis launches some well-aimed zingers in the direction of Washington. Her premise is that cities are key to our environmental salvation and, what’s more, have the ability to act now, in “an end-run around our present dilemma”—federal gridlock on climate change. “It’s not clear that Congress has a grasp on the moment, let alone a vision for the future,” she says. Prompting her column was an “improbably cheerful” new e-book, Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet, by futurist Alex Steffen. Jacobs has a few quibbles with Steffen, but debating massive and dubious investments in floodgates and other hard infrastructure to protect cities from future superstorms is, she says, “fighting over the symptoms when we should be working toward a cure.” Click the photo above to see the phuturenews story.

2-26-13 Stereotypes Ascendant

A recent Writer’s Digest article advised writers about creating dialog to fit their characters’ gender. “Achieving differentiation in the tones and spoken words of your male and female characters requires a careful touch,” the article advised, especially for characters whose gender differs from the author’s. The hints provided suggest a lot of fascinating and easily over-interpreted presumptions about the psychology of the sexes. For example, women writers are told that males tend not to ask rhetorical questions, to resist explaining, to be “more likely to show anger than any other emotion,” and not to notice details. Men writers, by contrast, are told that their women characters might better sympathize and share experience rather than give advice. Women characters would avoid bragging, “tend to be indirect and manipulative,” “bubble over with emotion,” and notice details. Wow! Though these oversimplified traits might trend toward reality, authors who strictly adhered to this list would end up writing characters no more challenging than those of a bad TV sitcom. It’s the unexpected that grabs people’s interest. The women who do give advice (especially if it’s bad); the men who do ask rhetorical questions. The whole article is worth consulting just to understand when to crack the mold!

2-25-13 The Oscar Hangover

Though the way our greatest actors deliver a line can mask its utter banality, I’m just glad there are Oscars that recognize good writing. Again, the nominees for best adapted screenplay were Argo, written by Chris Terrio; Beasts of the Southern Wild, written by Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin; Life of Pi, written by David Magee; Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner (with an historical lapse here and there); and Silver Linings Playbook, written by David O. Russell. Chris Terrio managed the demanding feat of keeping audiences on the edge of their seats, even though they knew how the story ended! Tough competition in this category.

The original screenplay nominees were Amour, written by Michael Haneke; Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino; Flight, written by John Gatins, Moonrise Kingdom, written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, and Zero Dark Thirty, written by Mark Boal (again with regrettable lapses). My sentimental choice was the charming Moonrise Kingdom, but the winner was the “raucous romp,” as The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane put it, Django Unchained.

2-23-13 LA Times Book Awards

Finalists for the Los Angeles Times’s annual Book Prize have been chosen, with the winners to be announced April 19, at a dinner kicking off the L.A. Times Festival of Books and open to the public. As always, I find I’ve read shockingly few of the nominees! The fiction list:

The Middlesteins: A Novel by Jami Attenberg
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon (read!)
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (to read soon!)
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Magnificence by Lydia Millet

The Mystery/Thriller List:

Broken Harbor by Tana French
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
The Expats by Chris Pavone
The Twenty-Year Death by Ariel S. Wint

 And, from the “Current Interest” list, a must-read: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

2-22-13 Lofty Achievement

Five years before Andy Warhol established his Factory in midtown Manhattan, photographer W. Eugene Smith created the Jazz Loft for artists, musicians, and denizens of the night. A prolific photojournalist, Smith settled in a seedy apartment in Manhattan’s Flower District (not far from the Chelsea Hotel) in 1957. He hardly left, choosing instead to photograph people who passed by.  He also began photographing, and recording, jazz musicians who came to the building for late-night jams. In eight years, he produced 40,000 photographs, which are housed at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.  He also recorded 4,000 hours of reel-to-reel audiotapes featuring dozens of jazz luminaries, including Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Charles Mingus, and Bill Evans. In 2009, New York’s WNYC developed a radio series based on these tapes. The Jazz Loft Project, a partnership between the Center for Creative Photography and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (click image above), showcases some of his prodigious work. (Guest News Poster: Jodi Goalstone)

2-19 to 2-21-13 The New North Coast

Economists and award-winning urban planners have a resurgent interest in the Great Lakes Region, home to some 55 million people in two Canadian provinces and seven U.S. states. The region includes major port cities—Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Rochester, Montreal, Quebec City—and the lakes contain 18 percent of the world’s fresh water supply. Visionaries see “a single, borderless region of natural and cultural heritage,” whose world-class research institutions could create paths to a post-carbon economy, green the cities of the Rust Belt, and protect the area’s water heritage, currently at risk from invasive species, air pollution, and agricultural runoff. For more information on some of this big thinking, see The Great Lakes Century and the links above.

2-18-13 “Side Effects”

Just when you think you know where Steven Soderbergh’s new (and he says, last) big-screen movie Side Effects is going, it takes a sharp turn. No spoilers here. It’s enough to say that the film is about the impact of the high-stakes psychotropic drug industry on patients and physicians alike. The critics certainly like it, and so did I! Interestingly, most of the main characters are women, with Jude Law, playing an earnest psychiatrist, the only significant male role. Catherine Zeta-Jones continues to dazzle, and Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is utterly convincing in the role of a seriously depressed young wife. Trailer.

2-16-13 Harmonious “Quartet”

Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet is an impressive directorial debut. In it, a multitalented group of elderly musicians prepare for a gala benefit concert that will prevent the closure of their retirement home. It’s been called a “musicians’ Marigold Hotel,” but the interplay among the performers gives the story added layers of depth. Maggie Smith (not typecast in her current crotchety persona), Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, and Pauline Collins (Cissy) are the quartet, and they are all wonderful. (Those with memories less impaired than Cissy’s will remember her as the troublesome maid Sarah in the original Upstairs, Downstairs. She’s brilliant here.) Be sure to notice the clever reflected names in Quartet’s opening credits—and stay for the closing credits, where the cast’s true musical identities are revealed. In between, you’re in for a charming treat. I’m especially glad this project was so successful for Hoffman, after last year’s misfortune with the underrated HBO series, Luck.

2-15-13 On Second Thought

I signed Sabrina Lamb’s change.org petition asking the Oxygen Network to cancel plans for the show called “All my Babies’ Mamas,” featuring rapper Shawnty Lo. As Lamb said in a follow-up email last weekend, “could you ever imagine a one-hour spectacle where 11 children are forced to witness their 10 unwed mothers clamor for financial support, emotional attention and sexual reward from Shawty Lo, the apathetic ‘father’?” I could, and I was appalled. So were 37,000 other people who signed Lamb’s petition, having heard her talk about the many things wrong with this disturbing “entertainment” concept. The petitions were delivered to Oxygen on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. That afternoon, Oxygen announced plans to shelve the program. Though NPR commentator Gene Demby suggests the show might have “humanized” the people involved, I still side with Lamb, who calls the cancellation “a victory for all of us who want all children to be treated with respect.”

2-12 to 2-14, 2013 We Have a Pope!

Great time to Netflix the 2011 Italian comedy-drama We Have a Pope! The story centers on a reluctant Cardinal who finds himself elevated to the Roman Catholic Church’s highest position and decides . . . I’ll let you see it. Not to miss: the vapid television reporter, the Cardinals’ private thoughts about the election as they ruminate amid the glories of the Sistine Chapel, the soccer game in a Vatican courtyard, the dueling psychologists. The movie is great fun but didn’t get much play here in the States. See papal selection in action! Trailer.

2-11-13 Can Tweets Predict the Future?

The federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence is supporting 14 research projects in the U.S. and abroad to find out whether it’s possible to predict “significant societal events,” by analyzing open source internet data, according to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek story. The data being skimmed for usefulness include billions of tweets, Google searches, Facebook posts, and other social media and publicly accessible online sources. Another forecasting approach, using prediction economies, is being studied by MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and doesn’t necessarily require social media fishing expeditions. Examples of events that security agencies would like to predict include coups, epidemics, financial collapse, and, of course, wars. One purpose of the current research is to find out what is, in fact, knowable. Ironically, one incredibly useful thing the government has become pretty good at predicting—the weather—appears to some congressional leaders as ripe for the chopping block.

2-9-13 A Snow Celebration!

“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

Snow Sculpture 2013

Snow Song

Snow: The Novel

Snow Mystery

Snow Poems Project

Snow Science

Pictured above–all you really need to know about snow!

2-8-13 “Was that ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay’?”

NPR reported last night that DreamWorks is considering the request by Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney (a Tufts history grad) to correct the DVD version of its hit film Lincoln. In the version we’ve all seen, the congressional vote on the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, began with Connecticut’s representatives shouting “Nay!” In fact, the Constitution State’s entire delegation supported the amendment. Courtney’s concern is that if the film is used in schools, it will give children an erroneous view of history and his state’s place in it. Since film images are generally much more compelling and memorable than history textbooks, Courtney’s caution is well placed. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine how such a mistake was made—or the cavalier attitude toward historical fact that allowed it—and even more surprising that it took so long to be noticed.

2-7-13 Surviving a City

Wired features a new exhibit of  photos of Detroit, Unbroken Down, in which photographer David Jordano focuses less on the “ruin porn” in so many depictions of the depopulated city and more on the spirit of survival of its remaining residents. “My work is not about what’s been destroyed, but more importantly about what’s been left behind and those who are coping with it,” he says. The photo at left depicts a house in the famous Heidelberg Project, “a street of dreams,” where since 1986 artist Tyree Guyton has used his neighborhood as a living canvas. (The photo at the top of my “Publications” page is also from Heidelberg.) Several more stories about recent books and documentaries featuring this once-great city, the archetypical embodiment of the American dream, are in The Morgue.

2-6-13 Covering Pride and Prejudice

Here’s something fun. As part of this year’s 200th anniversary celebration of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Slate has created a slide show of past covers. The dancing feet (men in white stockings) is nice, as is the one of Elizabeth Bennet sitting at a table watercolouring. At first I thought she was writing a letter, which would have been perfect, since P& P began as an epistolary novel. And letters still figure importantly in the plot, you’ll recall. Slate notes with wry understatement that the book has “inspired countless Hollywood movies and some bizarre reimaginings.” Amen to that. After two centuries, it remains popular, as Anna Quindlen explained in the introduction to a 1995 edition, because it is “about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel to teach us that that search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.” I’m putting on my “I ♥ Mr. Darcy” t-shirt and sitting down to write some letters.

2-5-13 So Much More than a Meal

The Dinner, the new psychological thriller by Dutch author Herman Koch reminds reviewers of a lot of tasty literary dishes. The 2/1/13 Wall Street Journal story about it was headlined “A European ‘Gone Girl,’” referring to the popular novel by Gillian Flynn, and the Guardian reviewer compared it to Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Roman Polanski’s (much-liked by me) 2011 film Carnage, based in turn on the successful French play, God of Carnage, by Yasmin Reza. Still, the book must have some independent allure, as it’s sold more than a million copies in two dozen languages. Each section of the book is a different course in the eponymous and ill-fated dinner, during which two brothers—one successful, one not-so—and their wives sit down to discuss an “outrage” committed by their teenage sons. By the time the reader gets to dessert, well . . . The Dinner will be served in the United States starting February 12.

2-4-13 Is the Pen Still Mightier . . . ?

Read Cecilia Capuzzi Simon’s compelling New York Times story about how some military veterans are working out the demons that follow them home from war by putting them in writing. The Washington, D.C.-based Veterans Writing Project, one of several located in various cities which she chronicles, offers free workshops and publishes a journal of veterans’ writing called O-Dark-Thirty. Putting anger, depression, anxiety and fear and the traumatic experiences into “a narrative that makes sense to you,” says an Iraq war veteran and editor of The Journal of Military Experience, “makes the trauma tangible. If it is tangible, it is malleable. And if it is malleable, you can do something with it.” One of the strengths of Iraq veteran Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds—one of the “best books” of 2012—is its exploration of post-traumatic stress. Why write about these things? Says the leader of the D.C. workshops, “We write to bear witness.”

2-2-13 No One’s e-Safe

Yesterday, Twitter was the latest media company to announce it had been hacked, with some 250,000 users’ data—“usernames, email addresses, session tokens, and encrypted/salted versions of passwords”—compromised in an “extremely sophisticated” attack, according to a Wired article. This underscores the importance of not only using different passwords for different accounts but, more fundamentally, abandoning the illusion that passwords in any sense protect personal data online. Last week’s high-profile admission by the New York Times that the usernames and passwords of its employees had been stolen show no one’s immune. While some commentators suggested the revelation might discourage sources from talking to Times reporters, other news organizations apparently are no safer, since several, including the Washington Post, soon revealed their own hacker attacks. (Are you a credible news organization if you haven’t been targeted?) In the past week, I’ve receive two phishing emails from “friends” whose email address books had been hijacked, but, thankfully, the recent coverage made me think twice before clicking. When will sites we depend on provide greater safety?

2-1-13 Master of Spies

Spy novelist Gérard de Villiers’s thrillers are read by intelligence officers and diplomats around the world, according to a fascinating New York Times bio and spring from his relationships with some of the best sources in the business. Over the years, his books’ prophetic plots have anticipated key events such as the attack on a Syrian command center in Damascus, the threat of jihadis in Benghazi, and the Islamist attack that killed Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. His book <em>La Liste Hariri</em>, about the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, contained more and more accurate details than in any public reports at the time and created such a stir that it was repeatedly on and withdrawn from Lebanese bookstore shelves. The 83-year-old French author churns out four or five sex-drenched books a year in his S.A.S. espionage series, now with almost 200 titles to his credit. Amazon has 91 of them, not all, apparently, in English. He’s not writing literature, de Villiers is the first to admit, but “fairy tales for adults.”

1-31-13 True Love

How appropriate that I happened to see the Oscar-nominated French movie Amour the day before trekking to Washington, D.C., for a two-day conference on efforts to improve advanced illness care. Unlike most “medical” conferences, this one was filled with participants’ personal stories—people who had gone through the terrors and indignities that Georges and Anne endure in the movie. For once the filmmakers decline to cloak the experience in romanticism and nobility, and the extraordinary actors present dying as the messy and traumatic business it is, and the conference participants confirmed the desolation felt when having to make care decisions for spouse, mother, dad. Every viewer should leave the movie theater determined to have the conversation with their loved ones about the care they want if they are very ill. And then, they must complete an advance directive (here’s a downloadable one) to “put it in writing.” In the movie, Georges stood up to his daughter to protect his wife from the medical system; not everyone can do that, and written confirmation about what patients want can save them from what they do not.

1-28 to 1-30-13 DDL Downton Detractor

Downton Abbey is great wish fulfillment candy, and how charming it would be to have phalanxes of capable, dedicated staff to help us dress for dinner, pick up after us, cook, clean, and otherwise protect us from reality. Viewers can only hope that this season’s plot escapes the soap-opera tropes of Season 2, coming perilously close with last night’s arrogant and misguided city doctor. Still, the costumes are wonderful, Maggie Smith has perfected the character she played so well in Gosford Park (both of them roughly modeled on the same aunt of Julian Fellowes, the shows’ writer), and the escapist romanticism. Turns out my fave Daniel Day-Lewis is a non-fan. The two-time Oscar winner, now nominated for a third, says Downton is the sort of thing that explains “why I left England.” Well! File it under “guilty pleasure” and enjoy!

1-26-13 Really Distracted Driving

Irresistible:  A 67-year-old Belgian woman set out to drive 38 miles from her home town of Solre-sur-Sambre to Brussels to pick up a friend, whose address she entered in her GPS. According to a widely reported news story, two days and 901 miles later, she arrived in Zagreb, Croatia, having driven across several countries and the Alps. “I saw all kinds of traffic pass. First in French, [sic] then in Germany . . . But I asked myself no questions,” the remarkably incurious woman said, and continued to follow the GPS instructions, despite the strange route. On her journey, she refueled the car twice and caused a minor accident. She told her family and the police that she didn’t notice anything wrong “until I suddenly arrived in Zagreb and realized I was no longer in Belgium.” She blamed the whole incident on being “distracted and preoccupied.” Click the image above to find artist Garvin Nolte’s “too much GPS information” video, Crossroads.

1-25-13 Hyde Park on Hudson

While the men in the new British-made movie Hyde Park on Hudson–Bill Murray as a charming FDR and Samuel West as an anxious King George VI—are believable and well played, the women are a puzzle. Eleanor and Queen Elizabeth (the later Queen Mum) are stiff and uncharming, when in reality they were known for social skills. Perhaps this is because the movie draws on the memories of Margaret (Daisy) Suckley, a sixth cousin of FDR who was a regular companion and confidante when he visited his mother’s Hyde Park home. The film is based on letters and diaries found after Daisy’s death, which may explain the skewed view of these two prominent women. But the filmmakers muddle the point-of-view by including scenes where Daisy was not present. The hint that her relationship with the President was more than friendship is a slim and not-so-interesting premise to support a movie about key actors in some of the 20th century’s most important events and helps explain its lukewarm reception.

Deeper Dive: Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley, by noted FDR biographer and historian Geoffrey Ward.

1-24-13 Your e-Library

Americans ages 16+ strongly support libraries’ online services. About three-fourths say libraries should offer free access to computers, the internet, and research databases. Still, the service they most often say is important is having librarians to help people find information (librarians agree!). Not surprisingly, almost 40% say they would be very likely to use an online “ask a librarian” research service. Likewise, many librarians see the library as “a place to enable access to information, regardless of the format,” according to
a survey report, released 1/22 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. More than half (53%) of survey respondents want libraries to offer more e-books, though librarians say high prices and publishers’ restrictions are problems. About 40% of Americans surveyed support dramatic changes for libraries—moving most services online and automating services. But others don’t want to lose their interactions with librarians or diminish the library’s role as a “community center.”

1-23-13 Prose  vs. Anti’s

The integrity (such as it is/was) of customer online book reviews is increasingly questionable. Last year saw a spate of exposés of authors encouraging wildly enthusiastic reviews of their books from friends and relatives—a practice Amazon is trying to crack down on, with mixed results. Occasional authors played both sides of the fence, encouraging good reviews for their own works (possibly money changed hands), and poor ones for their competitors, however defined. Now Randall Sullivan’s book, Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson, is the target of an organized group of Jackson fans using Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews. Amazon has been blasted with them, according to David Streitfeld’s recent New York Times article, leading to a backlash of positive comments. Current Amazon standings: 126 5-star reviews, 128 one-star reviews, and an improbable 29 reviews in between. I haven’t read this 586-page tome and don’t have thoughts about its merits or demerits, but I’m sad about the growing untrustworthiness of my supposed fellow-readers’ opinions. I’ve found many customer reviews helpful and insightful, but it seems these days they should be read with a generous dose of salt. Except, maybe, for those 29.

1-22-13 Broken City

No new ground broken in the “who can you trust?” political thriller genre, but the new Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe pic Broken City provides one essential ingredient: it’s fast-moving fun! Yes, it wanders into some familiar plot territory—the desert of betrayal, the arid plain of politico-financial self-dealing, the sea of redemption—but the dialog is snappy. And Catherine Zeta-Jones can be counted on to add a huge portion of class to any production. Her best line: “Your ride is here.” And, if you like movies filmed in New York, it has some great city shots. Much more authentic and engaging than six of the seven previews the theatre showed!

1-21-13 What Are You Wearing Tonight?

Click here for a look at First Ladies’ gowns of past Inaugural Balls, part of the collection of the National Museum of American History. The gown collection began when Helen Taft donated her ball gown in 1909. See the short video of the curator’s comments and those of the woman who makes the custom manikins on which the gowns are displayed—sized and proportioned like the original wearer—interesting stuff. One of the most frequent questions the curator is asked is, “So what if we have a woman president some day?” Technically, the gowns are not those of the First Lady, but the woman who serves as the official White House hostess. Usually that’s the wife, but it’s been daughter, niece, and even good friend. Think Dolly Madison. I remember Hillary’s purple gown (above)—a bold change from the previous decades’ pastels. You can bet the museum staff is looking forward to seeing what Michelle Obama wears tonight! Update: Fashion industry says “ruby red”; I say persimmon!

1-19-13 Environmental Film Festival

Princeton’s seventh annual Environmental Film Festival includes films culled from new releases and festivals around the country, as well as new works submitted in response to a call-for-entries. Among the movies highlighted this year are the award-winning You’ve Been Trumped, which shows how locals banded together when The Donald began building a huge golf resort on one of Scotland’s last coastal wilderness areas. (Already my blood pressure is rising.) Many of the films emphasize a strong sense of place, including Oscar-nominated feature Beasts of the Southern Wild and documentaries, such as Detropia and Battle for Brooklyn. Documentaries with a local connection include Sourlands “told from a deep forest surrounded by sprawl” and the Emmy-winning story of a poultry farmer, My Life as a Turkey, part of WNET’s Nature series. The festival begins January 24, running over three consecutive four-day weekends. Screenings are at the Princeton Public Library. Come and enjoy, or check the schedule for titles of interest, some of which can be viewed or ordered online. Then sit back and see some important storytelling.

1-18-13 Change of Subject

Last summer, I heard a literary agent tell a group of suspense writers, “No more terrorists. Please.” Yet the stream of new thrillers involving shadowy terror groups continues unabated. Just reading the news suggests other equally exciting subjects. Think of the plot possibilities in the U.S. Army’s expanded efforts to help Mexican authorities hunt down drug cartel leaders. Special operations personnel will be training Mexican commandos in the skills they learned battling Al Qaeda, according to a recent Associated Press story. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department has moved to freeze assets of a deadly new cartel under the Kingpin Act. The cartel has been involved in an “extremely violent turf war” within the state of Sinaloa, Treasury says, and is accused of being a major smuggler of drugs into the United States. Time to leave the dusty Afghani redoubts for special ops action closer to home?

1-17-13 Shaking the Family Tree

Americans by the millions are taking advantage of an enormous and ever-expanding collection of online records to explore their roots. I recently plunged into this $2.3 billion annual industry to trace my maternal grandfather’s family back to pre-Revolutionary War days and learned a lot about when and why families moved West—in our family’s case, from North Carolina to Tennessee to Texas. A 1/15/13 Wall Street Journal article, “When a Genealogy Hobby Digs Up Unwanted Secrets,” by Sue Shellenbarger, describes dramatic instances of people who’ve discovered unexpected or even unsavory information about their forebears. Some are forced to rethink their lineage, but many issues that would have been important or embarrassing in the past “just aren’t that big a deal any more,” says Megan Smolenyak, author of the 2012 book, Hey, America, Your Roots are Showing. Smolenyak is the genealogist who discovered Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry. For the most part, family researchers end up with a greater understanding of history, as well as a number of fascinating stories. Their stories. Read more about my own family tree search.

1-16-13 The Place to be That Was

Last year Detroit was the subject of two thoughtful books. Detroit [A Biography] by former Detroit News writer Scott Martelle traces the 310-year history of the city from its founding by French explorer Cadillac through its peaks, valleys, and ultimate freefall. Racial problems resurfaced again and again in that history, culminating in the devastating July 1967 riots, from which the city has never recovered. Population loss, the crashing of the U.S. auto industry, and downward-spiralling economic problems dug too deep a hole. It’s at this persistent low point that Mark Binelli’s book, Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis picks up. As the title suggests, he finds reasons for optimism, says Chicago Tribune reviewer and native Detroiter Jennifer Day. “As long as I can remember,” she says, “we were always waiting . . . for things to get better.” Detroiters, who have seen so many hopeful predictions come to naught, are still waiting.

See also: Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution.

1-15-13 Swimming in Dark Waters

For mystery lovers, the 560-page Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, is as deliciously irresistible as a chocolate cake. Some of today’s best mystery writers—including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Elmore Leonard—have written short essays about a hundred or so iconic mystery tales, from the well known to the deliciously obscure, from Edgar Allan Poe to authors currently writing. A few describe how a particular book inspired a lifelong love of mystery. For writer Liza Marklund, it was The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, a Nancy Drew mystery by “Carolyn Keene.” (For me, it was Keene’s The Secret of the Old Clock, which, before you turn up your nose, has sold more than 2.7 million copies.) According to the Bookreporter review, this compendium is “an answer to the question of why people who do not read mysteries should, and why those who do read mysteries do.”

1-14-13 Pitch Perfect

Pitch letters, book synopses, in-person pitches—creating them can seem harder than writing the novel! At a seminar I attended over the weekend, award-winning writer and former literary agent Alice Orr showed a group of fiction writers how to create more effective project pitches. Her book No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells includes a pitch-writing exercise that helps writers put her advice into action. An effective pitch uses words—verbs especially—that have impact, that are, she says “intense, powerful, and dramatic.” (See also 10/25/12 story below.) Strong words inflame and incite. But, “like dynamite, they have to be handled carefully,” Orr says. Too many batter your audience. You have to find the sweet spot.

1-12-13 The Good Bad News

The demand for e-textbooks is growing more slowly than forecasters expected, and e-books are “only a tiny percentage of course material sales” at college bookstores, according to a jconline article. The good news is that, if faculty aren’t making the switch to e-books, I, as the managing editor of a print-only textbook, will continue to see those royalty checks for a while! The bad news is that so much additional richness and timeliness could be brought to the educational experience with a well-designed e-book. But it seems many students, despite the higher price, still chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-find-e-textbooks-clumsy-and-dont-use-their-interactive-features/39082 prefer print’s advantages, especially if they want to keep the book. (Digital access typically expires after 180 days.) “The digital revolution is coming, and there will be a change,” said a university bookstore manager. “But it’s not now.”

1-11-13 A Difficult Balance

Architects designing U.S. embassies today have to balance “acute concerns about security” with the desire to represent America as an open, welcoming society say Thomas de Monchaux in Metropolis and architectural historian Jane Loeffler. Trying to solve the security problem with bunker-like walls, ugly concrete bollards, and razor wire sends the wrong message. The new London embassy (above), scheduled to open in 2017, meets security requirements with a 100-foot perimeter setback, and a series of berms and ponds that would foil approaching vehicles. The Beijing embassy (below), completed in 2008, also is surrounded by ponds.

Worldwide, the United States has some 70 million square feet of space in diplomatic buildings, which are in a constant state of expansion, upgrading, and replacement. Even in changing times, they must gracefully balance the competing demands placed on them, because, said Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular age were.”

1-10-13 The Wages of Cynicism

I write about my first print book read in 2013—The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (above)—from the depths of ignorance. The novel tracks real-life people and events about which I know too little and has only a few fictional characters (including the protagonist) animating the plot. It explores intricate political machinations pitting the Jesuits against the Masons and culminates in fabrication of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, incidentally, the Dreyfus Affair. Delicious cynicism courses throughout, including this from a key character: “Man’s principal trait is a readiness to believe anything,” the more outlandish, the better. Heavy going, lightened by the audiobook I also just finished, Michael Connelly’s debut detective novel, The Black Echo (1992). Its main characters shared not only the tunnel rat experience of Vietnam veterans (so compellingly described in Frederick Forsyth’s The Avenger [2003]), but also Eco’s cynical “trust no one” philosophy. One challenging book and one entertaining one—a great start to 2013’s reading!

1-9-13 Social Media & Criminal Defense

According to a recent Wired article by Ryan Tate, “Social media activity is more readily used to convict you in a court of law than to defend you.” This is because Facebook and other social media   outlets will turn over your private information and conversations to public officials—police, prosecutors, as required by the Stored Communications Act (SCA)—but not necessarily to your defense attorney. Defense requests in cases currently working their way through the courts, including a notorious Oregon murder case, may be ignored. Facebook’s arguments—which rest on preventing a wholesale opening of their records to every conceivable request—are analyzed in this TechCrunch article. Some kind of amended procedure is necessary to both assure privacy and prevent the scenario Tate envisions when he predicts that over time, the Act’s pro-law enforcement bias “is going to look less like a peculiar legislative oversight and more like a frightening erosion of the right to a fair trial.”  This situation could make an interesting plot point . . .

1-8-13 Earning Your Writing Chops

How many half-finished novels languish in desk drawers like embarrassing high school friends, reluctantly acknowledged and better forgotten? Should aspiring writers abandon the too-often disappointing quest to complete a full novel and perhaps start with more modest goals—flash fiction, short stories? That’s the question reiterated in a recent Galleycat post. Reader comments are instructive. Some people thrive with the discipline they learn in creating short stories. Others start out with a novelistic sensibility. Several comments emphasize the two forms’ very different requirements—the sprint versus the marathon. My own fiction career began with short stories (you can read a couple of them in “Publications”), and I still like writing them, even though I have 1.25 novels under my belt. The takeaway from the Galleycat post comments is that there is no single path to becoming a “real writer,” except, of course, for writing.

1-7-13 O’Horten. Odd.

Netflixed well-received Norwegian (or Norweigan, as the subtitles to a recent WWII b&w movie I saw would have it) film O’Horten over the weekend. Don’t be misled by the title. The movie is not about Ireland, but Oslo-based train engineer Odd Horten, and it was charming, low-key, deadpan fun. The opening sequence has you zooming through snow-covered tunnels and scenery from the engineer’s head-on perspective. A highlight: fellow train engineers celebrate Horten’s retirement–where he’s awarded a silver locomotive–by challenging each other to identify obscure train whistles. Which they do. Train nerds’ idea of a good time. Retirement encourages Odd to engage in a series of unexpected, even bizarre actions, including the metaphorical equivalent of ski-jumping (at age 67), the equally risky activity of reaching out to another person.

1-5-12 Internet Use: Europe and U.S.

Almost three-fourths (73%) of Europeans regularly use the internet, ranging from more than 90% in Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, to just under half in Romania. The proportion using mobile devices (about a third) also ranged widely, from a high of 70% in Sweden to about 8% in Romania, according to Eurostat. Just over 80 percent of American adults use the internet, with higher proportions among younger, wealthier, and more educated population segments. For example, 97% of Americans with annual household incomes of $75,000 and over use the internet. In both Europe and the U.S. (adults), about 90% of internet users most commonly use it for email. Social media use is more popular among all age groups in the United States than in Europe, though usage here and abroad is strongly skewed to the younger age groups. Sixty-six percent of U.S. adults online use Facebook specifically. One in five uses LinkedIn, and one in six uses Twitter. All of whom want to sell books, apparently.

1-4-13 Movies You Missed

In early January film buffs tell us about all the fabulous films of the previous 12 months that flicked through our theaters, if at all, too fast to catch them. Two such lists are in front of me, 12 films on one, 8 on the other, 0 on both, underscoring the idiosyncratic appeal of elusive cinema. From Erik Henriksen’s Best Movies You Didn’t See in 2012 list of 8 for Wired, the top 3 were: Safety Not Guaranteed (time machine); Killing Them Softly (“the sort of funny that makes you laugh and then hate yourself for it”); and The Queen of Versailles (billionaire takedown). I’ve seen none of them. Alarmingly, I have seen several films in Princeton Adult School’s next Second Chance Cinema series. Alarming because last year’s offerings included some of the most disturbing and depressing films going. An excerpt from the blurb about the season’s first film (Oslo: August 31) suggests more of the same: “this is that rare downer that eats into your mind and leaves you wide awake.” Another blurb: “A lost masterpiece it is not.” I’m starting 2013 fresh.

1-3-13 A Little Complexity, Please

Late last year, this website included brief summaries of lectures in a class I was taking on “Faces of Islam” (deeper in “The Morgue” now). Those similarly interested in the views of a quarter of the world’s population might take a few moments to read Haroon Moghul’s thoughtful essay, “What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?” which explores some of the inherent contradictions in the public’s and pundits’ views about  Islam and how this lack of understanding hurts the United States. For a more upbeat perspective, visit the website of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, which I toured last week. It’s the first and only museum in America devoted to the contributions and stories of our Arab citizens of many faiths–Muslim, Christian, and others–from the historical to the personal. It shows what Moghul’s essay tells us–putting all people of one culture or religion or nationality into the same basket is a risky business.

1-2-13 Unruly Words

The picture tells the story. The distinction between nouns and verbs isn’t as clear as we learned in sixth grade. The verbification of nouns is especially rife in business—“Conference her in”; “We can impact that”—and technology: “Just Google it!”; “Email me.” Orin Hargraves’s current article in the Visual Thesaurus ezine calls this “lexical arm-twisting.” A word commonly used as a noun is pressed into service as a verb or vice-versa—“make an ask” would be an example of the latter. Dictionary writers analyze the frequency of such off-label uses in deciding whether to add them to the list of a word’s meanings. By emailing, texting, and Googling away, we’re helping our language continue to evolve.

12-20-12 “So, How Was the Food?”

I’m giving up on consumer restaurant reviews. “The food was awful” isn’t helpful when trying to find an ethnic cuisine or flavors out of the ordinary. If only the writers began by establishing their bona fides. “I’ve never eaten anything more adventurous than Mom’s meatloaf, . . .” Or, “I’ve lived all over the world and eaten at many Michelin one-star restaurants, . . .” Then you’d know whether to take their opinions seriously. Last night I tried to identify a good Middle Eastern restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan—shouldn’t be much of a challenge, since Dearborn’s 98,000 population includes 40,000 Arabs. Within thirty seconds, I read reviews of two different restaurants where a customer complained they’d found a “used bandaid” in their meal. Either Dearborn restaurant workers need to sharpen their knife skills or the competition is seeding reviews with unsavory comments. Spreads suspicion thick as hummus on the whole enterprise.

12-19-12 Everyone Loves Sherlock in Their Stocking

Sherlock Holmes, who has dedicated his logical brain to solving crimes since 1887, continues to engage young and old. Holmes and his trusty friend Dr. Watson are regularly reincarnated in movies, available on DVD, as is BBC’s 21st Century Sherlock. Mystery writers, especially, relish taking up the pipe and deerstalker and trying their hand at The Great Detective. I just finished reading A Study in Sherlock, 16 stories “inspired by the Holmes canon” by such top writers as Lee Child, Laura Lippman, and Neil Gaiman. The book would be a perfect last-minute stocking stuffer or gift for yourself for those long, dark winter nights, the wind howling across the moors . . . sorry!  Also available now is the February 2013 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, with its annual Sherlock Holmes issue, containing three new Holmes stories. If Arthur Conan Doyle could look down from Author Heaven and see this continued outpouring, surely he would recognize it as pure devotion.

12-18-12 Filling Santa’s Bag

Need a last-minute present for a friend suspended between love of books and addiction to technology? Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store is the ticket. Author Robin Sloan, Twitter’s former manager of media partnership, deliberately plugged in up-to-the-minute cultural references. “I want it to feel scarily like right now,” said Sloan in a Wired blurb. And it does. A young man steeped in web culture takes a job in a bookstore and ends up in an adventure tale that pits Google experts against book-dependent members of a mystical society. A “slyly arch novel about technology and its discontents,” says Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

12-17-12 – Academic Adventure — CASE CLOSED!

Last week the University of Chicago admissions office received a mystery package. From a would-be student? A prankster? An alum trying to upstage the legendary  U.C. Scavenger Hunt? A person obsessed with the Indiana Jones saga? Inside the plain, somewhat battered kraft-paper envelope with the phony stamps, Egyptian postmarks, and old-fashioned typed, gummed label was a meticulously handmade replica of the journal Henry Walton Jones, Jr.—Indiana Jones to you and me—used to find the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It isn’t the prop from the movie. It isn’t the “journal” recently sold on eBay.*** It includes maps, photos, a White Star line steamer schedule, and other ephemera. The most perplexing questions are “Why?” and “Who?” If an effort by an admission-seeker, he or she has already shown a high level of creativity, willingness to work hard, skill in scholarly research, and more than a little nerve. Just what Indy would want to see in a U.C. student!

***Oh, yes it was! The journal was sent to the buyer, the outer wrapper was destroyed [?!] and all that was left was the fake envelope inside. Hummmph. I am SO bummed!

12-15-12 “Our Hearts Are Broken”

Twelve facts about gun use and gun ownership in the United States. Here are 27 more:

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Further valuable thoughts and perspective.

12-14-12 Christmas Bon-Bons

“Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisings and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.” [Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory Hear it here.]

“This,” said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, “this is, indeed, comfort.”
“Our invariable custom,” replied Mr. Wardle. “Everybody sits down with us on Christmas eve, as you see them now—servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories. Trundle, my boy, rake up the fire.” Up flew the bright sparks in myriads as the logs were stirred. The deep red blaze sent forth a rich glow, that penetrated into the furthest corner of the room, and cast its cheerful tint on every face. [Charles Dickens, “A Good-Humored Christmas Chapter” from The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 28.]

“’Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.” [John McCutcheon, “Christmas in the Trenches.” See it performed here.]

12-13-12 Books and Crime

A passing remark stands out in Wired’s interview with award-laden science fiction author  Lois McMaster Bujold. She mentions reading an interview with a forensic pathologist who said he’d “never gone into a bad crime scene in any house where there were a lot of books.” She speculates that a book is a window to another person’s mind and increases empathy, “the closest thing we have to telepathy.” And, while critics may turn up their noses at escapist literature, “escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.” Another interpretation is that books show people many ways to be a hero, other than taking a gun into a crowded shopping mall.

12-12-12 What an Idiom!

Another excursion into the realm of the odd phrase is Jag Bhalla’s I’m not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a compendium of 1,000 idioms used by people around the world, which say a lot about cultural views. An example: “thighs shaped like banana trees,” a compliment in Bengali, would reduce a young American woman to tears. The noodle title is a Russian phrase akin to “I’m not pulling your leg,” no doubt equally mysterious on the other side of the world. Here are a few others: “a butterfly’s leg” [Polish, to describe a mild insult]; “throw face” [from El Salvador, to make a good impression]; “There’s Grandma for you” [Russia’s “a fine kettle of fish”]; and “no time for a seat to get warm” [Japanese idiom for “crazy busy”]. Published by National Geographic, the book has received high praise. In acknowledgement of my Flamenco class later this morning, I’ll end with a Spanish phrase: “to be as happy as castanets.” No translation needed.

12-11-12 – Thinking Outside the Box

A fun gift this season—or a treat for yourself—might be British journalist Nigel Fountain’s recent book about clichés, The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread,  which explains and skewers modern clichés, their meaning, origins, and notable usages. Examples from “all things being equal” (17th c.) to “bad hair day” (late 20th). Includes some of the annoying phrases beloved in the business world—“thinking outside the box,” and “to be perfectly honest”—a dead giveaway to be on your toes! Entertaining and informative. If you’re really energetic, you might try to figure out why, in Amazon’s cover graphic and author blurbs for this book, some editions appear to be written by Patrick Scrivener. I’m all at sea.

12-9-12 Little Dickenses

Great Expectations, Robert Gottlieb’s new book describing the fates of Charles Dickens’s 10 children “reveals [a] trajectory of disappointment, time and again,” according to Janet Maslin’s New York Times review. Perhaps they never quite lived up to his hopes because his imagination was consumed with idealized children. The fictional girls, especially—Florence Dombey, Amy Dorrit, Lucy Manette, Esther Summerson—are extravagantly devoted to their fathers (and father-figures), even unrequitedly. Pip, who abandons Joe Gargery, suffers deeply for his disloyalty. David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Oliver Twist are admirable young fellows, persistently and energetically overcoming their many adversities. By contrast, Dickens said of his oldest son Charley (at age eight), “a strange fading comes over him sometimes”—an echo of the many lines in Dombey and Son on the theme, “it is necessary to make an effort.” Despite the large rollicking families Dickens often described, he kept his own children at a distance, escaping to the retreat pictured above to write, where, as Charley said, “the children of his brain were much more real to him at times than we were.”

12-8-12 Hilary Mantel

Larissa MacFarquhar’s recent New Yorker profile of two-time Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel reveals an odd and fascinating character–a suitable subject for one of her own novels. She’s suffered from a chronic pain condition, which typically affects a person socially and psychologically, as well as physically, and I think it shows in the intensity and interiority of her writing. Nothing is gained without struggle. Her choice in recent years to write historical fiction, which binds the writer to predetermined facts and outcomes, whether during the French Revolution–A Place of Greater Safety–or the 16th Century court of England’s Henry VIII–Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, about ill-fated royal counselor Thomas Cromwell—limits her fictional choices. She knows what happens to her characters, as do we, but in the moments she is writing about, they do not. No wink at the modern reader, “but we know too well that this was a poor decision,” from Mantel. As MacFarquhar writes, Mantel’s style acknowledges that “at every point things could have been different.” And she therefore challenges us as readers to hold in our minds two discordant thoughts: a belief in the multitude of possible futures and the certainty of a single one. It is why historical fiction, in the right hands—in Hilary Mantel’s hands—is some of the most riveting fiction available today.

12-7-12 Islam and Democracy

Princeton professor Amaney Jamal, author of the new book Of Empires and Citizens: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All? spoke at my “Many Faces of Islam” lecture series this week. While Westerners tend to believe that changes in a country’s underlying society—a bottom-up approach—will automatically change its political institutions, this view minimizes the very real differences in political views and Islamic movements across Arab nations, she said. The current turmoil in Egypt shows that a popularly supported regime change doesn’t inevitably lead to pro-democratic government. Jamal’s research finds that many citizens in Arab countries recognize the economic and security advantages of having a good relationship with the United States. In many cases, ironically, this leads to support for their existing non-democratic regimes, rather than a desire for changes that might disrupt those ties.

12-6-12 Wordrobe

Enjoy (or “can’t stop yourself from”) picking out misused words and other language lapses peppering the media? You might want to visit Wordrobe, a website devoted to word games—four so far. To up the ante and increase your score, you can bet on the accuracy of your answers. And, lest you think these games are a mere time-sink, the results of play are being used for research on how people process words. Research on Natural Language Processing will eventually be used to help computers think more like humans—English-speaking ones, at any rate. Wordrobe players’ responses are stored in a massive Meaning Bank, at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. One of the easier Wordrobe games requires you to distinguish the function of words that can be nouns or verbs, like “chair.” In a given sentence, does chair mean a piece of furniture (noun), or “to lead a meeting” (verb)? We humans immediately understand which meaning is correct, but a computer must learn how to decode the context. Visual Thesaurus magazine has an intriguing article about the project, including the stumper (for computers), “The guidebook suggests cliff walks along the seashore” versus “Mother suggests Cliff walks along the seashore.”

12-5-12 I Served the King of England

Did you ever show someone a hilarious New Yorker cartoon and receive a blank stare? What strikes one person as funny simply puzzles another, which is why recommending comedies is risky. Men, for example, dominate Three Stooges fandom, whereas Y-chromosome deficiency causes me to leave the room when people are stepping on rakes and bonking themselves or making a terrible mess in the small-screen kitchen. (“Who’s going to clean that up?”) With trepidation, then, I write about I Served the King of England, a well-received Czech film, Netflixed last weekend. Directed by Jiri Menzel and released in the U.S. in 2008, the action takes place just before and during the Nazi takeover and their replacement by the Communists. It’s quirky, has beautiful camera work, and many funny and endearing moments, as well as recurrent confetti effects that strike me as very Czech. The actors playing the ambitious, apolitical, go-with-the-flow waiter were engaging, and their work deserves a broader audience. But cavorting Nazis stuck a wrench in my enjoyment.

12-4-12 Pinteresting

Bulletin boards crammed with scraps of pages torn from magazines, greeting cards, color swatches, airline ticket stubs—you name it—help me corral my thoughts about a project. And I’m not the only one, given the amazing popularity of Pinterest—or the “mood boards” of professional designer Ilse Crawford or novelist Rebecca Makkai. These productions are like highly personal mental maps, where the relations among things can be either literal or associative, even when we don’t yet know what the association is. The closet door in my office (photo above), displays ephemera related to my Rome-based thriller Witness. You can see the map of Rome, flagged with key locations (one literally “off the map”), and underneath it is a hand-drawn schematic of the house my character Eugenia visits, which I needed to keep her from wandering out a door that isn’t there. The pictures of the Spanish Steps and Castel Sant’Angelo helped me really see those places. I’m still too attached to the tactile to start working with Pinterest yet—and I have three more closet doors in this office—but when I do, I’ll want to check out the resources on this helpful blog post from Ginny Soskey.

12-3-12 On Writing Groups

Charming story in Sunday’s New York Times about writing groups. I’m in two. One of them meets monthly around my dining table. Having someone in our group who produces short pieces for oral presentation has sharpened our ears for dialog; having a memoirist and a fantasy writer-turned-memoirist in our group has quelled our reluctance to write closer to the bone; and every member helps us weed out anachronistic, overwritten, or vague constructions. When we have time, we do a group exercise from the back of my tattered John Gardner. Contrary to advice, we don’t have written rules, though we do have  common expectations regarding contribution, civil discourse, and support. People who don’t fit have discovered that for themselves—in one memorable case, after only one meeting! Though we’ve had no horror stories yet, there’s every reason to pick your own group carefully and find one that nurtures your particular writing spirit.

12-1-12 The Nutshell

Results of the annual “tagline” competition are in. The contest assesses the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations’ efforts to encapsulate their aims in one pithy statement, and it’s run by the always interesting Getting Attention! blog. Winners included the following personal favorites:

  • New Depot Players Community Theatre: “Play Your Part”
  • University of West Florida Libraries: “The Quickest Way from Q to A!”
  • Maryland SPCA: “Feel the Warmth of a Cold Nose”

Kudos to Nancy Schwarz for organizing this competition and all her other work to help nonprofits get their message out. Authors struggling to find a title for their next book—one that pops off the cover, reflects the heart of their content, and motivates the public to take action (buy this book!!) could gain inspiration from this list. Contrast, for example, the “I have to pick it up” title Bring Up the Bodies with the just puzzling HHhH, both New York Times notable books of 2012.

11-30-12 Saudi Arabia’s Dilemma

Further insights from the terrific lecture Karen Elliott House presented at my “Faces of Islam” class this week (see 11-29-12 for more). “The entire country needs a radical overhaul,” concluded the New York Times review of her recent book. Saudi Arabia will run out of oil. Exports are already declining, as domestic use has risen. The huge welfare system the royal family has established with the oil revenues—which enables people to live a middle class life without working—will crumble, and the populace is not prepared to take up jobs. Currently, 90 percent of private-sector employees are foreigners. Sixty percent of the population is age 20 or younger, but the Wahhabi-run education system focuses on religious instruction. It does not prepare people to earn a living. The justice system is in such a state that Saudi Arabia is increasingly “a lawless society,” in which each judge is free to interpret Sharia law in his own way, and many laws are enforced unevenly, or not at all. When Saudis complain privately, it is not because they want to replace their legal system with a Western-style democracy. “They aspire to ‘justice,’” she said, and they believe justice can and will come through Sharia.

11-29-12 Whither Saudi Arabia?

Karen Elliott House, former WSJ publisher and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist spoke about Saudi Arabia at my “Faces of Islam” class this week. Her just-published and well-reviewed book points out three areas of weakness in the country: the lack of a succession plan in the huge royal family, an issue in the news again the day this was posted; the prospect of declining oil revenues, which keep the economy afloat and the royal family in power; and fractures in the society’s Islamic underpinnings. With respect to the latter, she says it’s near-impossible for people in a secular society to understand the pervasiveness of religion there, how it directs every sphere and daily activity of life. But she sees the Islamic hegemony weakening, because the ruling family has overreached, co-opting the religious establishment to support its political aims; Internet and tv are showing Saudis there are more varieties of Islam than the conservative Wahhabi version practiced in their country; the religious establishment has to deal with issues never contemplated by the religion’s founders (“if I’ve downloaded the Qur’an to my cell phone, can I take it with me into the toilet?”); the emergence of powerful new religious voices on both the conservative and liberal ends of the spectrum; and growing awareness of the gap between the way Islam is preached and the way it is practiced. Fascinating.

11-28-12 – Stranger than Fiction

What would you bet that recent news coverage of the exhumation of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, eight years after his death in a French military hospital, is already inspiring thriller writers to fire up their laptops. The problem of opportunity would be worthy of a dozen chapters at least. And, when it comes to motive, though Palestinians believe Arafat was poisoned, and the Israelis did it, that’s too simple. Other more sinister possibilities also deserve exploration in mind-bending plot twists. Arafat was old, losing influence, out of touch with younger, more Islamist factions. Might an ambitious splinter group see a twofer in his mysterious death? Get him out of the way and have a terrible “crime” to blame on Israel? How about the West? Might a rogue spy posing as a doctor and speaking execrable French inspire a movie version, too? The fictional possibilities are, well, thrilling.

11-27-12 Safe Creative Space

Guest blogger Ed Cyzewski on the estimable Jane Friedman.com blog talks about ways authors can meet the demands of a productive writing career, from blog posts to the chapters that, one by one, create a book. His goal is higher-quality writing that imposes less stress on the author. And, in his 30-page e-book, he offers further encouragement to the creative spark. In the blog post, he describes his tactics for minimizing stress: working ahead, having an arc of blog posts planned, not waiting until the last minute to start writing. To achieve better quality writing, he suggests putting a finished piece or chapter aside for a while, then rereading and reconsidering before hitting “post” or typing “FINAL.” In other words, you can give yourself the space to be creative by giving yourself the precious gift of time.

11-26-12 The Long Form

Struck by a tidbit in Wired writer Angela Watercutter’s (awesome name) interview with David Simon, producer of two of the best storytelling tv series of recent years The Wire and Treme about New Orleans’s post-Katrina struggles. It takes time to explore and understand complicated stuff. (The photo above is of the “long black line,” the dirty high-water mark of Katrina flooding, taken seven months after the storm.) The interview kicks open many interesting doors, but early on, Simon advocates reading novels, because, Watercutter says, “some familiarity with long-form storytelling might help people understand [his approach].” As a person who just finished reading a 948-page edition of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, I agree! Twitter, texting, one-click ordering, all good in their place.

11-24-12 The Round House

Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award for her latest novel, The Round House. I’ve been a fan ever since Love Medicine, winner of the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. This latest book has been characterized as a “coming of age mystery,” and centers on the theme of justice. In a recent interview, Erdrich described herself as “a day laborer who occasionally gets flashes of instinct and illumination.” Such as this, from The Round House: “For the first time since we’d pulled out those trees the Sunday before, my father smiled, or it was some version of a smile, I should say. There was no amusement in it. Later on, if I had to classify that smile, I would say it was a smile like Mooshum’s. A smile of remembrance of lost times.”

11-23-12 You Go, Girls!

The Girls in the Band, an award-winning documentary film, chronicles the musical chops of women in modern jazz. Most endured taunts and racism not unlike black baseball teams who toured the South during the Jim Crow era. All endured the intolerance of their male counterparts who largely kept them out of the spotlight, wisps of which linger. The film interweaves their stories with those of contemporary women jazz artists who have many fewer barriers to stardom, including Jane Ira Bloom, Anat Cohen, Geri Allen, and Maria Schneider, who leads a mixed-gender big band. See her band at a 2008 jazz festival in Spain.

Thanks to Jodi Goalstone,Guest Poster.

11-21-12 The Ways of Wine

El Camino del Vino—the translated title is above, though I kind of like the more literal “The Wine Road” better—is a charming Argentinian partly-fiction/partly-true film about world-famous sommelier Charlie Arturaola, who suddenly loses his palate at a key wine-tasting event. The movie begins with the epigram “A glass half-empty of wine is also one half full, but a half-lie is in no way a half truth,” (Cocteau), and Arturaola struggles with the consequences of the half-lies and half-truths he tells about his condition and to himself. This is more than embarrassing, because vintners keep asking him to taste their best wines, and we see their growing bafflement at his pained reaction. Various people suggest cures, none of seem destined to work. I saw the movie, directed by Nicholas Carreras, at the Trenton International Film Festival 2012, and it’s a fine Netflix choice. Fun and funny. Trailer.

11-20-12 YA Grows Up

After adult readers picked up, read, enjoyed, and became devoted to Harry Potter and even the Twilight and Hunger Games books, attitudes toward “young adult fiction” have begun to shift. All are examples of how powerful storytelling transcends genre. Another book in the serious teen fiction category that has snared adult readers (and writers) is John Green’s non-dystopian, non-wizardly The Fault in Our Stars. While the story, centering on a 16-year-old terminally ill cancer patient, is not one I would automatically warm to, it was an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” in January 2012, and has climbed its way into the hearts of readers and writers whose opinions I respect. For what it’s worth, nine hundred of its 1,100 Amazon reviewers gave it five stars, as did two-thirds of GoodReads raters. It might be just the right gift for a young-ish person on your holiday list or for stuffing your own literary stocking. Here’s a video excerpt read by the author.

11-19-12 War’s Lurking Shadow

News that Marine hero Karl Marlantes’s riveting novel Matterhorn is being made into a movie stirs mixed emotions, for all the obvious ways it could go terribly wrong. A reminder of this book came via a Veterans Day replay of an interview with Marlantes when his highly regarded book, What It Is Like to Go to War was released in 2011. In that book, Marlantes says, “We must take time to make these people [in professions of violence] aware of their particular shadows and have them clearly understand that they carry this shadow with them—always.” Recent reports of the high suicide rate among U.S. veterans underscores that terrible truth. Two of this year’s National Book Award nominees for fiction likewise mine this adumbral territory through the perceptions of Iraq war veterans: Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. See John Williams’s interview with both.

11-17-12 Sharia Law

My “Many Faces of Islam” class recently introduced Islamic jurisprudence. Abed Awad, a U.S.- and London-trained lawyer described Sharia law as a moral system that governs every aspect of life—from the way food is cooked to the way business is conducted. Today, this moral system runs in parallel with nations’ legal systems, for the Muslim community, even in the United States. However, when Sharia law conflicts with U.S. law and its principles, judges should ensure that U.S. law prevails. According to Awad, the fears about Sharia law infiltrating U.S. society are “much ado about nothing,” but the vehemence of the opposition and widespread lack of information, fueled by anti-Muslim sentiments guarantee the controversy will be ongoing.

11-16-12 Password, Please

Like the large number of people who read the 11/7/12 New York Times article, “How to Devise Passwords that Drive Hackers Away,” by Nicole Perlroth, I put her advice high on my to-do list. Now, along comes Mat Honan, senior writer for the Wired Gadget Lab with a critique of the Times piece suggesting, essentially, no matter how secure your passwords, “you will be hacked. Putting the responsibility for computer security on us befogged users is misguided, he says. Instead, consumers should demand that the big companies we work with solve this problem, by requiring multiple levels of authentication. OK, but in the short term? I changed my passwords. And I do not use  easily-crackable pet names, birthdays, and other simple formulations. (Over 90% of computer users employ one of the 10,000 most common passwords.) P.S. Thursday’s Times reports a hacker breach at Adobe. Uh-oh.

11-15-12 Bond at 50

Hard to believe there have been 50 years of Bond movies. 22 so far. He has become an enduring character in our collective imaginations. Despite Ian Fleming’s death in 1964, his legacy and enterprise lives on, with a new Bond book (by William Boyd) expected in early 2013. The Golden Anniversary is inspiring quirky lookbacks, including Jen Chaney’s review of the 10 best Bond movie theme songs, complete with graphics and trailers. My favorite—“You Only Live Twice”—made the list at #6, and the “best song” of all?—Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger,” of course. Another retro-theme is the evolution of the Bond Girl into the Bond Woman. However that role may have changed, Skyfall proves it’s still a dangerous job.

11-14-12 Spyfall

The revelations of adulterous love affairs in the higher reaches of the U.S. military and security apparatus are depressing. Not so much because of the betrayal itself, exactly, though that’s not uplifting. Not because it reveals the vulnerability of the male ego to youth and of the female ego to power, traits seemingly hard-wired by evolution. And not because it makes us slightly cringe at our culture’s moralistic response to adultery, versus, say, how the French or Silvio Berlusconi might react. (Silvio is raising his hands, shrugging, and saying, “Che cosa???”) What’s upsetting is that presumed security-conscious experts, people who hold our future in their hands, would document their dalliances via email with the most trivial attempts to hide their activities. Please, people. My first reaction was “Read a couple of good Technothrillers!” Perhaps “world leader conducts illicit affair via unsecure email” should become #21 on the list of 20 Technothriller Tropes We Hope Never to See Again. Nah, too unbelievable, even for Hollywood. (BTW, Skyfall violates numbers 2, 3, 16 and, most of all, 5.)

11-13-12 Skyfall

If I don’t rave about  Skyfall, it’s not because I didn’t enjoy parts of the movie–and all of Daniel Craig–but because it was just too much of a good thing. (And, who anointed poor Javier Bardem King of Weird Hair?) There were nice moments, especially Bond lifting a Heineken, which, along with the Bond-themed ad he made for the beer has enraged 007 and martini purists alike and led to Daniel Craig’s defense of product placement. While Bond films—the good ones—have always flirted with over-the-topness, there’s a line between over the top and so far over that the viewer abandons engagement. If the filmmakers turn around, they’ll find this line somewhere behind them. Still, the film is worth it for the images of candy-colored Shanghai at night. Acrophobes, beware!

11-12-12 Miami Book Fair

The print book is alive and well at this week’s 29th Miami Book Fair International, under way in Florida, bringing in more than 350 authors to meet readers, other writers, and book industry representatives and to attend the associated Writers’ Institute. A highlight is the fair’s IberoAmerican Authors Program, which reaches out to Latin American and Spanish writers, with workshops and other programming presented in Spanish or Portuguese. Past Fairs have been truly international, welcoming authors from Bosnia, Canada, China, France, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Ireland, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and many other nations. A huge Street Fair begins November 16, with opportunities to browse and buy books from hundreds of publishers and book sellers. The fair is a project of Miami Dade College and its Center for Literature and Theatre. Fun for readers and writers and foodies, too, with a gastro-literary experience, The Kitchen. [Some of these links take you to the 2013 schedule.]

11-10-12 Movie Time

Opening this weekend: Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln, produced by Stephen Spielberg. In my opinion, DD-L is perfection, ever since Last of the Mohicans, and New York Times critic A.O. Scott says “he eases into a role of epic difficulty as if it were a coat he had been wearing for years.” Says critic Charlie McCollum in the San Diego Mercury-News,“ he looks like he walked straight off a $5 bill.” The way the story is told, according to Scott, makes the movie more a political thriller than a biopic. Big point in its favor, in my book! See the trailer and hear a bit of  John Williams’s score.

11-9-12 The REALLY Big Cats

What is it about tigers? Those found in books, not baseball stadiums (a lingering disappointment). A new children’s book, Oh, No! by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Eric Rohmann features a hungry beast. The Life of Pi is coming later this month. And, in recent years, best-seller lists included both Tea Obreht’s dreamy The Tiger’s Wife and non-fiction The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant, which describes the Amur tigers of far eastern Russia—one of the best books I read last year! Highly recommended.

11-8-12 Hallucinations

Oliver Sacks’s careful documentation of the ways the human brain can go off the rails is receiving renewed attention with publication of his new book, Hallucinations. He was interviewed on the Terry Gross show a few weeks back about the new book, and the portion I heard had to do with the hallucinations attendant upon migraine. I have migraine and consequently had read Sacks’s fascinating book Migraine. He describes the amazing panoply of symptoms and debilitating manifestations that can accompany this condition, which many people think of as just “a really bad headache.” No wonder I gave an Italian priest in my novel Witness migraine. As a child, he believed his hallucinations were messages from God and dared not reveal them to anyone:

People knew he had headaches, but people do have headaches from time to time, so his mother or the school director would give him an aspirin, or two or three, and let him lie down. He would sleep and be hard to wake. ‘His brain needs to rest,’ his mother would say, and everyone understood that as both diagnosis and treatment.

These hallucinations become a crucial plot point. Perceptive and empathetic Sacks-like analyses of mental disorders have inspired the rise of the neuronovel. My favorite: Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning detective story, Motherless Brooklyn, whose narrator jangles with Tourette syndrome.

11-7-12 Falling Behind?

“I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.” This quote struck me as sounding like the laments I hear from friends struggling with their smart phones—“smarter than I am”—juggling the remotes for their tv setups, new ever-more-elaborate computer software, iGear, social media, you-name-it. They reveal a sense of falling behind, while the world gallops ahead. This was the theme of Christopher Durang’s new comedy that premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in September: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. (The play then went to Lincoln Center Theater and is well worth seeing.) “We had telephones and we had to dial the number by putting our index finger in a round hole,” says late middle-aged Vanya to the young studly Spike. “We had to have PATIENCE then.  . . . We didn’t multitask. Doing one thing at a time seemed appropriate. But I guess you can sort of listen to a play and sort of send a message and sort of play a video game . . . all at once. It must be wonderful.” This is part of a hilarious five-page rant about the loss of innocence and what Vanya feels as the disconnectedness of modern life, which really is his disconnectedness. The quote leading off this piece, expressing a similar sentiment, comes from Dombey and Son, written 166 years ago by Charles Dickens. It also describes a world disrupted and evolving as a result of new technology: the railroad.

11-6-12 Eugenia’s “Must-Read”

Update:  Tomsky interviewed on WBUR’s Here and Now 12/5/12.

My fictional travel writer Eugenia Clarke MUST read Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality, a new book by Jacob Tomsky, which reveals “the dirty little secrets” of hotel management, according to Janet Maslin’s entertaining New York Times review. As Tomsky says, people “propose, get married, impregnate each other, turn 40, get divorced, snort heroin, murder and die in hotel rooms. Sometimes in that order.” Eugenia is on it!

11-5-12 The Life of Pi

If was surprised to read that Cloud Atlas has been made into an ambitious movie, I was amazed to see a trailer for The Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s 2001 fantasy novel that won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2002. The book totally depends on the reader’s acceptance of its startling premise, that a shipwrecked boy could sail the Pacific Ocean in a tiny boat in company with a Bengal tiger. Any false movie-making step that snaps that illusion would be disastrous. Still, I’ll be at the head of the line later this month when the movie–in 3-D–opens. The book’s early chapter, when the boat has more occupants, was the best use of allegory I’ve read in a long time, and I hope it’s preserved. Early reviews suggest the story was in good hands with Ang Lee. [I’ve seen the movie now and thought it was wonderful. The framing device of the journalist interviewer works, and the allegory is explained, perhaps over-explained, at the end. The 3-D? Awesome!]

11-3-12 Lost in Space

Orin Hargraves’ column for Visual Thesaurus magazine this month talks about the difference between traditional spoken, written, paper-map wayfinding and using GPS. The latter is (almost always) more reliable, of course, but we when we give up the big map, we lose the macro sense of our position relative to our surroundings, our idiosyncratic mental maps. (The 1826 map at right is of Wilson County, Tennessee, when my great great great grandparents lived there.) Remembered details of a route or associations with past times or familiar places—“turn at the house that looks like Aunt Helen’s old place”—answer the question, “Where am I?” more profoundly than an LCD showing a few square blocks. If the GPS fails, can we find our way home without it? Hargraves’s observations remind me of how I had to relearn to tell time—what time means—when consulting a digital clock. At first, I couldn’t interpret the hour and minute displayed out of context, without all 12 numbers and the position of the hands relative to the whole. The same kind of thing happened in my first encounter with a rental car’s digital speedometer. I missed that familiar dial. GPS is great—mine speaks with an Australian accent—but the map pocket is always full, too, so I can know precisely where I am and where I AM.

11-2-12  A Fading Bright Line

Nice section in literary agent Donald Maass’s new book Writing 21st Century Fiction about the fading bright line between genre and literary fiction. He points to many specific instances of novels with writing so persuasive, characters so developed, and storytelling so engaging that it may have roots in genre, but it blossoms as literature. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is one of his examples—a murder mystery based in an alternative history. And very, very comic: “Landsman gets paid—and lives—to notice what normal people miss, but it seems to him that until he walked into Zimbalist the boundary maven’s shop, he hasn’t given enough attention to string.” Read it. Loved it. What’s important, Maass says, is “powerful story and beautiful writing bound together.”

10-29-12 Teach Your Brain New Skills

Reading to find out what a literary work “means,” is not the way to get the most out of it, suggests Stanford professor Joshua Landy. Nor should we read it expecting to become better people “in the moral sense.” In his new book, How to Do Things with Fictions, he suggests that reading great authors can sharpen the intellectual capacities. Reading Plato, for example, trains the brain in how to develop and assess arguments by letting Socrates make some rather obvious logical errors. Reading the parables in the Gospel of St. Mark helps us learn to express ourselves in powerful metaphors. “Even the disciples do not understand them,” he said, and their purpose wasn’t to convey specific meaning, but to suggest a new way of thinking and living. What he doesn’t say is, reading fiction is fun! Maybe in the midst of a pleasurable experience, our brains relax enough to absorb new skills.

10-27-12 Fitting In

My class on the Many Faces of Islam was off this week, which I’d forgotten and went anyway. On the bright side, there was plenty of parking. At the previous lecture a participant asked whether the integration of Muslims into society was easier here in the United States than in Europe. The speaker, historian Katherine Fleming, said it appears to be, despite the many difficulties. In part, this is a result of our own history. Although the “melting pot” theory has fallen out of favor, Americans are more likely to see the country as a tapestry of many threads, rather than as having a rigid, homogenous culture—Frenchness or Dutchness or Englishness. I hope that is so.

10-25-12 –Verbs Work

My least favorite verb is “get.” With its myriad meanings, it’s practically a placeholder, as if I’m promising myself, “I’ll put in a ‘get’ until I can think of what I want to say here.” Whenever I find a “get” in my own writing, invariably I can replace it with a more specific and more interesting verb. It’s a classic underperformer. In her new book, new book, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing, Constance Hale says, “The verb pulses not just at the heart of our every memory, plan, and wish, but at the heart of English itself.” Pick, prune, nourish, and flaunt them well.

10-24-12 Justice on Mars

The Italian judicial system has again demonstrated its baffling ability to reach decisions out of sync with reality and common sense. Yesterday it announced the decision in a case that put six scientists and a government expert on trial for not correctly predicting an earthquake in the town of L’Aquila. The 2009 tragedy killed 309 people, and the defendants’ manslaughter convictions, if upheld, will land them six years in prison. This follows on the notorious eye-rolling investigation and prosecution of  the case of a serial killer, who perpetrated 16 murders in the 1970s and 80s, described by Douglas Preston in this Atlantic article, The Monster of Florence, and his book of the same name. An unbelievable succession of unlikely individuals was accused by the prosecutor—the same man who carried out the witch-hunt against American Amanda Knox, a case expertly chronicled by journalist Nina Burleigh.

10-23-12 –  Thriller Favorites

Psychologist Jack Apsche has written a book based on interviews and 150 letters from a notorious Philadelphia serial killer.  Gary Heidnik was one of the models for the character Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, which turns out to be the favorite thriller of some 17,000 NPR listeners. I’ve read a surprising number of books on that list. How about you?

10-22-12 – War Horse

Nothing today about crime, criminals, punctuation, or other uncomfortable subjects. Couldn’t resist sharing this Washington Post story and info-graphic about the puppeteering in the play War Horse. A testament to the power of story, even a simple one, and such beautiful staging, yes, you do start to think Joey the horse is “real.” And possibly more responsive than some human actors. Tour information.

10-20-12 – Is Castro Really Dead?

Media coverage of continuing rumors that Fidel Castro has died made me think first of Saturday Night Live and its looong deathwatch for Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco and, second, that the rumors contain the seeds of a thriller plot. . . . Castro has been dead for years, and a shadow government has been keeping him “alive” through complex fakery, a body double (like Kevin Kline in the film Dave), and controlling both internal politics and external relations. Is “Fidel” a CIA plant? A Soviet one—in place so long they’ve forgotten about him? Aging, with creeping senility, does he start to believe is Fidel? The irony of the name. There’s a pony in there somewhere.

10-18-12 – Mantel’s Repeat

Hilary Mantel won this year’s Man Booker prize for Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume in her trilogy about Henry VIII’s advisor, Thomas Cromwell. That, despite her odd writing tic of rarely telling the reader who is talking. The first in the trilogy, Wolf Hall, won the Booker in 2009, making her one of only three authors to repeat, the first woman to repeat, and the first author to win for a sequel. Some naysayers wish the judges had used the opportunity to highlight the work of someone lesser known, even experimental. I’ve read both Cromwell books and Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety about the French Revolution and enjoyed them. She effectively evokes an era with quotidian details, and places her characters in an atmosphere of extreme uncertainty. The tension is tremendous, because they don’t know what’s coming, but we do.

10-17-12 Art Theft: The Recurring Nightmare

Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Gauguin. . . . Overnight Tuesday thieves stole seven famous artists’ paintings from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam. The thieves’ methods haven’t yet been revealed, but stealing such valuable pieces is infinitely easier than disposing of them. Says Robert Wittman in his book Priceless, “the art in art crime isn’t in the theft, it’s in the sale.” He and several other authors have dug into the biggest art theft in history—works from Boston’s Gardner museum—which remains unsolved after 22 years. Journalist Ulrich Boser calls that theft “its own sort of masterpiece.” Enjoyed his book, The Gardner Heist, also Amore & Mashberg’s Stealing Rembrandts. Entertaining research for my thriller Witness.

10-16-12 Crimefighter’s Best Friend

In crime novels and thrillers, heroes work solo. In real life, they might partner with a dog. Sniffer dogs are still “the best mobile bomb detector in the business,” according to an October 2012 New York Times article. Not only can dogs detect minuscule amounts of an explosive chemical, they can distinguish it from the myriad other trace scents in a busy environment—“the needle in a haystack,” said a scientist at Auburn University’s Canine Detection Research Institute. In a February 2012 New Yorker essay on crime-fighting dogs’ training and deployment, a canine officer said, “I guess I’m an adrenaline junkie. I got into canine to hunt men.”

10-15-12 Argo – A Real Thrill

A perfect thriller, the new Ben Affleck movie Argo is based on real characters in a real situation—the six Americans who escaped the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and hid in the Canadian ambassador’s home. With CIA help, they attempted to escape Iran in the guise of a Canadian film crew. Balancing the film’s humor and terror were the greatest challenge, Affleck says in an October Wired interview. Read the 2007 article that inspired the film, also in Wired. Great story then. Great story now. And, a flourishing bow to our Canadian cousins, whose feathers were inadvertently ruffled by the film’s treatment of their role in the drama. Fixed now. Trailer.

10-13-12 Cloud Atlas

Later this month, a movie version of David Mitchell’s award-winning book, Cloud Atlas, is due out. The movie was written and directed by siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski (“The Matrix”) and Tom Tykwer. Mitchell considered the book “unfilmable,” and I want to see how they pack six separate stories that take place in six countries and time periods into two hours! Lana W. has said she hopes the movie will “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous. You didn’t know everything instantly.” Hope so, too. Picture gallery