Category Archives: The Morgue

Why I Don’t Eat Octopus

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octopus

(photo: wikimedia/commons)

Several compelling articles about the octopus have emerged lately from the laboratories of marine biology (like this one in Wired 10/2013, by author Katherine Harmon Courage who’s written a whole book on the topic). They’ve dangled fascinating information in front of my nose. Like: researchers cannot set anything down—coffee cup, clipboard, whatever—near their octopus tanks unless they want to find them in the tank. Like: the octopus does not have a central brain, as vertebrates do; its intelligence—supposedly on a par with that of dogs—is distributed throughout its body and works quite differently than ours. Like: the eight arms of an octopus can mimic the texture and color of whatever surface the animal is resting on, and they can do so separately—two gravelly-looking arms and six sandy-looking ones, for example. Amazing.

Last week I snatched up Octopus, by Richard Schweid, one of a series of natural history books published by Reaktion Books, Ltd., now atop my 2015 to-read pile. The book is rich with photos and illustrations from world art, and its first line is a grabber: “When you watch an octopus, an octopus watches you back.”

A question to Mr. Know-It-All in this month’s Wired is, “I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?” Christopher Niemann’s response concludes “all animals are likely too intelligent to eat.” But he concedes readers will probably continue to eat them anyway. He says, “I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.” Or empathy. But I don’t eat octopus not because they are too intelligent, but because they’re too interesting.

For more Octopus-amazement, see my review of The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.

The Unknown Known & The Fog of War

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White House, snow

(photo: wikimedia.org)

The Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known (2013)(trailer) grew from 34 hours of interviews with former White House chief of staff, ambassador to NATO, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, special Mid-East envoy, and twice Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld—in case you’ve forgotten his prominent public persona as a star of Bush-era press conferences—” Slate reviewer Dana Stevens reminds us, “tends to express himself in koan-like platitudes that hover in midair somewhere over the divide between timeless wisdom and obfuscatory bullshit.”

The film’s title is based on one of his better-known riffs, the evasive and insufficiently serious response to a reporter’s question in 2002 about the evidence for Iraq’s link to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld responded that there are “known knowns” (stuff we know that we know), “known unknowns” (stuff we know that we don’t know), and unknown unknowns (stuff we don’t know that we don’t know). The premise of The Unknown Known is there also was stuff Rumsfeld thought he knew, and didn’t. Which sums up the whole stated justification for the Iraq war.

It’s hard to watch this movie without being distracted by one’s own political views, as Rumsfeld, ever the cagey communicator, genially evades and stonewalls where he has to, especially regarding the use of torture. Yet he is capable of showing uncertainty—and would that he’d done so a dozen years ago. The interviews are interspersed with news clips, excerpts from news conferences, and on-the-ground footage of the time, so you do see some misremembering. His then-conviction about whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction is quite a contrast to his “I guess time will tell” shrug regarding whether the Iraq war was a good idea or not.

His evasions degrade political language, Forbes reviewer Tim Reuter suggests, and by constantly redefining difficult issues, Rumsfeld erases their meaning, rather than clarifies. In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott says Morris gives Rumsfeld “plenty of rope, but rather than hang himself, Mr. Rumsfeld tries to fashion a ladder and escape through the window.” One problem he couldn’t slip out of was Abu Ghraib, because shocked Americans had seen the terrible pictures. As head of the Department of Defense, he offered President Bush his resignation—twice. But Bush didn’t accept it.

Rumsfeld’s many memos were called “snowflakes,” and he blanketed the Department and his fellow Cabinet members with some 20,000 of them during his six years in the Bush Administration. In the film, he reads from a number of them, now declassified. Yet the viewer, like the recipients of that blizzard of memos sees only the Don Rumsfeld he want us to see. Given his penchant for verbal legerdemain, he must have enjoyed the idea of snowflakes. Of snow. And of snow-jobs. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 84%; audiences, 69%.

UPDATE: In January 2015, I saw Morris’s other documentary on a former Secretary of Defense, The Fog of War, created from interviews with Robert McNamara. While, like Rumsfeld, he sees history from his own particular vantage-point, unlike Rumsfeld, McNamara seemed to have learned some significant intellectual and emotional truths from the experience. The film in fact is organized around 11 “lessons.” The difference in affect between the two men is remarkable. Although there were questions (mostly personal) McNamara declined to answer, he wasn’t trying to obfuscate and he wasn’t insufferably smug.

Be a Tortoise Not a Hare

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tortoise and hare

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Almost all novels, said Pulitzer-winner Jane Smiley in a recent Publisher’s Weekly article, are imperfect because they are “capacious and hard to contain.” This is why editors invented the creative byway of rewrite, and where many self-published books trip up. Joyce Carol Oates’s students said she taught them that to be a writer they had to not stop writing, Jane Smiley puts the idea this way: “novel-writing is a choice—you can always stop.” But don’t. Smiley provided several tips to keep writers going.

“Be the tortoise, not the hare. Every draft is first and foremost an exploration before it is a work of art.” This is at odds with the desires of the publishing industry, which can pressure authors for the next book in the series and may explain why later books don’t always live up to early promise. And, don’t be in a hurry to show your work to other people, Smiley says. Only when you’ve exhausted your own “curiosity” about a book, find people whose input can help you move it toward completion.

Advice on every list, including Smiley’s is “read a lot.” We learn more than we think we do by reading, she says—facts as well as form. Her writing showed me that a writer can even go into the mind of a thoroughbred horse in a heartbreaking way. Yep. Smiley’s Horse Heaven (2000) is one of my favorites.

Look and listen. She gives permission to turn to good use those people-watching skills, as well as that ability to ask the question from left field. “You cannot know human variety and maintain good manners at the same time,” she says.

Finally, she says, enjoy the process, and let the possible rewards take care of themselves. “If you love the process, you will be happy. If you focus on possible rewards, you will be unhappy.” Especially good advice at a time when the path to publishing is so full of stumbling blocks! Nice roundup article right here on those.

London Calling

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Sherlock Holmes, London

(photo: wikimedia)

The Museum of London has a new exhibit that will have mystery lovers dusting off their passports. “Sherlock Holmes: The man who never lived and will never die” will be on view until April 12, 2015. If you can get there by Friday, November 21, you can participate in “Late London: Sherlock’s City,” a multipart event that includes mind games, improv, theater, and liquid refreshment. There are archaeology events, a Sherlock Holmes walking tour, and much more planned. During Dickens’s 200th birthday celebration in 2012, the Museum of London offered a terrific exhibit. This promises to be as good.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum claims the address of 221B Baker Street (but is actually between 237 and 241). In Conan Doyle’s day, the street did not extend into the 220’s. The entity (now closed) that actually did have his address had to employ a full-time secretary to open and respond to the voluminous correspondence sent to Holmes there.

Or, branch out a bit with the Mystery Reader’s Walking Guide: London – Second edition. I have the first edition (also available), and it’s a tantalizing neighborhood-by-neighborhood tour where favorite fictional detectives—even modern ones—have encountered deadly doings. Enjoy!

PRIDE

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Pride, Dominic West, Bill NighyIt’s easy to be swept along by the positive emotion and engaging performances in Pride (trailer), including its stirring climactic music (oddly recalling the heart-swelling “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Mis, another losing battle against implacable authority). The story is based on the extraordinary outreach of London’s gay community to striking Welch miners and their families in 1984.

Going with the flow, you may feel something more was accomplished by this effort, but in fact Margaret Thatcher’s intransigent government broke the strike after a hellish year, and the gays didn’t quite know it yet, but they were staring into the dark pit of AIDS. Perhaps successfully reaching across a cultural divide is sufficient cause for celebration in these polarized times. Pride without the prejudice.

Setting aside the larger context, it’s altogether a feel-good movie, and I felt very good any time Dominic West was on screen. The entire Pride cast is strong, including stalwarts Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, baby-faced Ben Schnetzer as the real-life Mark Ashton, George MacKay, and Jessica Gunning as Siân James.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 94%, audience rating 93%.

Categories vs.Tags = Chapters vs. Index

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tags, tea

(photo: wikimedia)

No doubt this blog would benefit from a better system of categories and tags (the words that appear at the bottom and let readers search for similar content). Here’s a guide from the Elegant Themes blog on how to make those improvements. My tags alternate between the too general (“book”) and the too specific (the name of a person I’ve written about once). Time for a clean-up.

If you’re a blogger, you may have been as mystified about the difference between categories and tags as I still am, and this post will help there, too. It asks you to think about your blog as a book, with your categories as chapter titles and your tags as the index—more detailed, in other words. That means it’s easier to change and add tags than it is categories, if you already have a lot of content. (Ideally, this should have been done two years ago, when I started, but there you have it. Perfection is elusive.)

The link provides a helpful list of do’s and don’ts, too. Many of which this blog violates. Faced with such a situation I always hear the immortal Jonathan Winters calling, “We’ve gotta get organized!”

Can-Can

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Sinatra, MacLaine, Can-Can, Cole PorterWatched the 1960 musical Can-Can last night. Such great Cole Porter songs, and two terrific dance numbers choreographed by Hermes Pan that were awfully modern for “1896,” even in Paris. And, of course, not to mention lots of can-can dancing, followed by police-whistle blowing, followed by general mayhem. This is not a movie you watch for plot. Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chavalier, Shirley MacLaine, Louis Jourdan, Juliet Prowse—all up to snuff, and then some.

The DVD began with the overture playing and a black screen, and just as I was convinced the thing was defective, the 20th Century Fox logo popped up. There’s also a black screen intermission and postlude. Throw up a slide, people!

Charming credits with Toulouse-Lautrec –inspired drawings, so I cannot explain why the poster is so awful! Songs: “I Love Paris,” “You Do Something to Me,” “It’s All Right with Me,” “Just One of Those Things,” “C’est Magnifique.” (Not all of these were in the original Broadway production.) Sigh.

And, amazingly, when Nikita Khrushchev visited Hollywood after pounding his shoe on the table at the United Nations, this is the movie they took him to see!

Olive Kitteridge: on TV

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Olive Kitteridge, HBO, Elizabeth StroutI hope you  spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO’s Olive Kitteridge instead. I’d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn’t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle, where she had an innovative, meaty role.

Olive Kitteridge will be playing on HBO (2 parts) numerous times in coming weeks, so if you missed it the first time, try to catch it. Just for the acting alone, it’s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I’d read the book, so was prepared for Olive’s prickly personality. She’s likely not someone you’d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans calls the production “maybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.”

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others’ feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature—someone who truly won’t bother to be likeable. “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,” a character in the book says. Her father’s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn’t seem so. And just when you’re about to give up on her, she’ll do something remarkable.

Finding Philip Marlowe

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Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart

(art: wikimedia.org)

Some authors are unalterably linked to a particular place and time—Faulkner, Dickens, Cheever. For Raymond Chandler, the time and place are Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s. His books about that era convey a very specific mindset, with such classic lines as “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself” (The Long Goodbye), “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” (Farewell, My Lovely); and “You know what Canino will do—beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling” (The Big Sleep). You can’t read his rhythms without seeing Humphrey Bogart as the perfect personification of his detective, Philip Marlowe.

According to Electric Lit, from Malibu to Pasadena, Chandler’s “iconic spots dot the landscape.” Now you can retrace the high (and low) points from this master of the hardboiled detective novel with a new map of the City of Angels
, written and compiled by Kim Cooper and designed by Paul Rogers, which the publisher calls “an insider’s guide to the city Chandler knew.”

Cooper’s company Estouric conducts literary, true crime, and California culture tours, including “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In a Lonely Place” and “The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare,” as well as the uplifting “Mausolea of Los Angeles.” (Mystery writers attending the big Bouchercon conference will have a special edition of the Chandler tour.)

Given the amount of research done for the tours, the map was a logical next step. Cooper had to do a fair bit of digging, too. “I was thrilled to be able to confirm the actual location of Victor’s, the bar where Marlowe and Terry Lennox grow close over gimlets in The Long Goodbye,” (my review) she told Electric Lit.

Winners’ Circle Too Tight?

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Japanese print, road, stream

Flanagan’s book’s title is from a 17th c. Japanese epic poem (photo: wikimedia.org)

The day after the U.K.’s prestigious Man Booker Prize longlist was announced last summer, UK publisher Tom Chalmers expressed his doubts. While he noted the importance of book prizes as “an increasingly key route through which to discover and champion the best writers, to elevate and highlight the brilliant above the masses of books now being published every year,” they too often fall short, he thinks, by making safe choices.

Still, he pointed to a couple of happy exceptions: the 2013 Costa Book of the Year Award that went to The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer and the Bailey’s Women Prize for Fiction that went to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride.

Unfortunately, this year’s Man Booker longlist caused him to make “a quick check of the calendar to confirm I was still in 2014. In fact, in this Millennium.” Last year’s Man Booker prize was the 826-page doorstop The Luminaries, by Elizabeth Catton, while the big U.S. prize, the Pulitzer, went to Donna Tartt’s 784-page The Goldfinch, an award promptly subjected to rampant second-guessing (though not as much as the consternation in the U.S. literary world in 2012, when the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded no fiction prize at all). I read and liked both of these Big Books, anomalous as they are in a world where 350 pages seems the upper limit on publishers’ risk-taking.

As for the Booker, Chalmers doesn’t object to the new addition of U.S. authors to the pool of potential longlistees—though some of the prize-winning authors do, feeling people from smaller Commonwealth nations will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Americans. Case in point: The 2014 winner, Richard Flanagan, is from Tasmania, which most Americans couldn’t find on a map. He won with a book about World War II, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on his father’s experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war. (Flanagan dedicated the book to his father, who died the day he was told the book was finally finished.)

Chalmers does object to the rules change that allows automatic entries for previous winners. And he notes the selection committee’s neglect of independent publishers. These factors shift the prize toward the familiar, the safe, when it should be “discovering and highlighting the most exciting, dynamic and talented writing.” I want the winnowing role played by awards judges to help me find the best-written books. It will be disappointing if it becomes just an insiders’ club.