Category Archives: The Morgue

Flammen & Citronen

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Flame and Citron, Mads Mikkelsen, Thure Lindhardt

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Wandering the Internet, I found reference to this 2008 Danish drama (trailer) about Danish resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation. Flame and Citron being their noms de guerre, one for the man’s flaming red hair and the other for his having bombed the Citroën auto factory. Directed by Ole Christian Madsen.

The film is loosely based on two real-life and much-decorated fighters, Bent Faurschou-Hviid, played by Thure Lindhardt, and Jørgen Haagen Schmith, played by Mads Mikkelsen—looking, as always, like he just ate a bad oyster. They start their train of murders with Danish collaborators, in order to minimize German reprisals, but when they branch out, it gets complicated. Where are their orders coming from? Are they killing collaborators or innocent Danes? The ambiguity and hesitation they feel seems much more real to me than the Killing Machine assassins of so many films.

The fractures in human relationships and trust that occur in such pressure-cooker situations are not a surprise, and the denouement is over-long, but the movie is compelling and well acted. It was nominated for numerous awards, winning several. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; viewers 82%. “To its credit, the film gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence of war; the struggle for liberation from tyranny rarely looks so dubious,” said Colin Covert in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

The Dictionary in 2014

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Alice in Wonderland, words, Humpty DumptyIn his September column for Visual Thesaurus Orrin Hargraves comments that in pre-Internet days, as if we could remember back that far, dictionaries carried “a certain authority.” They not only satisfied writers that they were spelling and using words correctly, but they also resolved tricky dinner-table arguments. But today, dictionaries may be as likely to start those arguments as to settle them.

Because the Internet enables a much wider discussion and debate of word meanings, people have available to them a wider range of information on which to base word choice, giving dictionaries a run for their money. When using foreign words, I rely on the Internet site WordReference.com for straight meanings and its wide selection of idioms, but I also use its discussion threads in which native speakers debate usage and suggest how they would express an idea. Very helpful, especially with slang, which changes more rapidly than more formal speech.

Hargraves says the dictionary “is no longer regarded as an anchor of certainty on the reference shelf,” thanks to the usurpation of its role as arbiter by the lightning speed and facile opinions of the Internet. He cites this example: a recent BuzzFeed article took Merriam-Webster to task for defining “pit bull” as “a type of dog that is known for its strength and its ability to fight.” In its irrelevant objection to this characterization, BuzzFeed posted numerous cuddly pit bull photos. Dog-lovers rallied. And BuzzFeed concluded Merriam-Webster had some cleaning up to do.

These fans should have read the British dictionary definition and encyclopedia entries regarding pit bulls provided by dictionary.com! The inconvenient fact that the “ability to fight” was developed through decades of deliberate breeding was ignored; the definition was treated as a value judgment.

Hargraves’s second example came from Quora, where a user asked, “Which is more correct: ‘have a bar mitzvah’ or ‘get bar mitzvah’? Hargraves notes that the most popular answer endorses neither of these usages, in favor of “to become (a) bar/bat mitzvah.” While the original meaning of the term did refer to the child, in current usage, it most often refers to the ceremony. “Usage, that old tyrant, has nearly eclipsed the original meaning of bar/bat mitzvah in the majority speech community,” he says, “and usage is in fact what determines what words mean.”

Despite such debates, dictionaries will continue to base their definitions on actual usage, so people who don’t like the definition of pit bull and those defending the original meaning of bar mitzvah have a lot of usage-changing to do. But don’t blame Messrs. Merriam and Webster: “Dictionaries merely document the evidence.”

Google Algorithms at Work

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Google

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Everyone has noticed—and is from mildly to serious annoyed—that after we visit a website looking for garden tools, say, Google generates an avalanche of related ads. Last year I bought a scarf online and, for the next few months, my social media were draped in it. What gives? I already bought the darn thing! You’d think the system could distinguish between “Purchase completed” and “Still interested. Maybe? Nice, right? You like?”

Two RISD graduates—Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell—decided to test the limits of networked marketing by emailing to each other, page by page, Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 scorcher, American Psycho. You’ll recall the book is about Manhattan businessman and serial killer Patrick Bateman, and is notorious for its graphic sex and violence. What ads would Google’s hard-working algorithms find relevant to these emails? Huff and Cabell wanted to know. The interesting results revealed what the author’s say was “GMail’s unpredictable insensitivity to violence, racism, and sex.”

A page that included the murder of a man and a dog by a knife-wielding attacker did generate ads for knives and, in a grisly touch, knife sharpeners. And a page with a racial slur carried no ads at all. But the most common ad across 408 pages of mayhem? Crest Whitestrips. Maybe a “just keep smiling and all this will go away” message there.

You can get a pdf of the book they compiled from their results, which includes all 800+ ads as footnotes (minus the contribution by Bret Easton Ellis). Something he wrote that appeared on page 27 stimulated an ad for “folding chair parts.” I can’t imagine. And, on the very last page, a way to avoid “3 Awful Guitar Mistakes.” Probably not one of Bateman’s top-of-mind worries.

Movies on the Brain

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Natalie Portman, Black SwanGreg Miller’s recent Wired article about how movies trick your brain into empathizing with characters begins by describing the scene from 2010’s psychological thriller Black Swan. In this intense scene, Natalie Portman, playing a ballerina vying for the role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, begins to believe black feathers are sprouting from her skin. “When people watch this scene,” Miller says, “their brain activity bears some resemblance to a pattern that’s been observed in people with schizophrenia,” according to neuroscientist Talma Hendler.

At a recent Hollywood event, Black Swan’s director, Darren Aronofsky, said he’d “be thrilled” if he gave audiences “a temporary taste of psychosis.” It may work that way through the activity in two brain regions shown by functional MRIs to be connected with empathy: one, she calls “mental empathy,” the classic, putting yourself in another person’s shoes feeling; the second, “embodied empathy,” is more visceral, the kind of weak-in-the-knees feeling I get when I see someone else’s cut or injury.

Having studied people’s reactions to emotional movie scenes, Hendler believes both types of empathy are important in shaping what they experience. Schizophrenics, however, tend to rely more on mental empathy. “It’s as if they’re having to think through the emotional impact of situations that other people grasp more intuitively and automatically,” she suggested. And in that scene from Black Swan, Aronofsky believes viewers’ minds mimic that, by being engaged in trying to figure out whether the feathers are real or Portman’s hallucination.

Aronofsky, known for his surreal and sometimes disturbing work, uses a filmmaker’s entire toolbox to shape the audience’s emotional reactions. He cited his film Requiem for a Dream, in which addictions cause the main characters’ lives to spin out of control (Ellen Burstyn received an Academy Award nomination). He began that movie with wide shots, graduating to tighter and tighter ones, “to convey an increasingly subjective sense of what the characters were experiencing. There’s always a theory of where the camera is and why it’s there.”

Dear Class

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Dear ClassDelighted to announce my friend Jane Stein’s children’s book, Dear Class: Traveling Around the World with Mrs. J., with charming illustrations by Pamela Duckworth, has been published and is available for ordering online.

The book is about a teacher who visits more than a dozen countries in an amazing six-month trip. It’s based on the travel log of the real Mrs. J, who took this trip in 1963. Readers learn about her adventures through the letters she writes her students, reproduced in the book.

Sidebars include historical information, updates, fun facts, websites, and activities. Written for children ages 8 to 12, Jane says, the book is the story of living out a dream—in this case, to travel around the world–and having the adventurous spirit to do it alone.

During the course of her adventures, Mrs. J studies at the Sorbonne, visits a school in Istanbul, lives on a houseboat in India, and more. She sets out to learn about people, places, food, art, and the culture in countries around the world. While she does that, she also learns a lot about herself.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter. Order for your kids, grandkids, kids of friends, and reward this imaginative, fun project! Good work, Jane!!

Days of Rage and Pain

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White House

(photo: pixabay.com)

Three days in Washington this week afforded the opportunity to read one of the country’s great newspapers (and about its new Jeff Bezos-appointed publisher) over my croissant and coffee and smear myself with printer’s ink. Not the same experience as online.

I read the discouraging Washington Post coverage of the state of affairs in Ukraine, and it offered a special section on Obama and Putin, which I brought home to read on a day when my blood pressure might be dropping. I’d just read David Remnick’s long piece in The New Yorker about the travails of former Russian ambassador Michael McFaul and wasn’t ready for more from Vlad the Unveiler (think bare-chested photos).

I read about the disastrous state of the Ebola outbreak and thought about how last year Neil’s 3-hour stay in the outpatient surgery unit of a new hospital in our area produced a bill well in excess of $20,000. That was for use of the room (no doctor fees—those were extra—no lab tests, no x-rays) and a carton of cranberry juice. What the struggling and filthy hospitals in West Africa could do with one day’s take from that facility! Or any U.S. hospital.

The second beheading of an American journalist, looking bravely forward while his assassins covered their faces, as well they might.

The continued intransigence of all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rushing deeper and deeper into a labyrinth that would appear to have no way out.

The Justice Department and Ferguson. Police forces in U.S. cities I’ve never heard of armed better than some countries.

Inevitably, the Post covered stories about people considering a 2016 Presidential run. I could only guess they’re not reading the same newspaper I did!

Le Weekend

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Lindsay Duncan, Jim Broadbent, Le Weekend

Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent in Le Weekend

Saw the previews for this movie (trailer) several times last spring, and it didn’t look promising. In it, two past-middle-aged Brits have a madcap weekend in Paris, fumbling around in their relationship, the wife mercurial—laughing one minute, enraged the next—the husband hoping for sex. They’re living high but low on cash, and full of petty irritations. For once, the previews were right. Plus they showed all the best barbs. How this ended up in our Netflix queue, I don’t know.

Still, the acting was flawless, with Jim Broadbent as the husband and Lindsay Duncan as his wife. A wonderful smarmy performance by Jeff Goldblum as a sycophantic fellow-academic who outs the fact that the couple’s lives are falling apart. Olly Alexander has a juicy part as Goldblum’s bored son. Another dinner party disaster, uncomfortable to watch, yet unbelievable.

Critics liked it. The Rotten Tomatoes reviewers’ rating: 89 percent, but audiences seemed more in my camp: 55.

Been There! The Danube

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Danube, Orthodox churchI’m reading a book by Nick Thorpe about the Danube and encountering familiar scenes from the middle portion of the river we sailed on last year. Almost the exact photo at right is in the book, called “The Church Above the Waters” and on Thorpe’s BBC page “an Orthodox monastery.” The rooftops have been restored and slightly redesigned–made rounder–since his earlier pictures, though, and the church has a new coat of whitewash.

Vukovar

Danube, VukovarI wish I’d learned more at the time about Vukovar, besieged by the Serbs in the early 1990s, and the memorial on the farm where patients and staff from Vukovar hospital were taken and murdered. The townspeople kept their damaged water tower as an ad hoc war memorial. A deteriorating water tower in my experience reflects economic hard times, but both meanings apply here. Thorpe says, “The doves of peace have taken over” the tower now. Pigeons, at any rate. And he describes, Vukovar’s most famous scene of rebirth: “In one of the houses near the (river) shore, still in ruins, purple flowers burst from the frame of an upstairs window.”

Thrilling First Sentences

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homeless, dog

(photo: shiftfrequency.com)

Thrillerfest—the International Thriller Writers’ annual summer get-together—this year sponsored a first sentence contest, in which seven leading thriller writers looked through a pile of manuscripts submitted for critique and picked their favorite openers. Below is what some of the masters find gets them going. Let’s hope the authors polish up their manuscripts and deliver them into the hands of publishers soon! Watch for them! I marked my favorites—the more stars, the better. Yours?!

Wylde knew it was too early, but when the girl started screaming, he went in anyway. (Judith O’Reilly)

**Death couldn’t part us soon enough. (Katalin Burness)[I like the narrator’s tone already!]

Sophie was late—and naked. (Terry Rodgers)

Quizz Murphy propped himself against the cold facade of an office building and summoned a nearby sparrow to pluck the lice from his beard. (J. E. Fishman)

***I knew what I was doing; I just didn’t know what I was capable of. (Nathaniel Free)[lots of possible places to go after an opener like that. And a semi-colon. Whoa!]

Dad, are you and mom getting a divorce? (Ray Collins)

*Sleeping with a married guy was one thing, telling his wife he was dead was another. (Margaret Carroll)[OK, you got me. She could have borrowed the semi-colon, though.]

Is it “social” or is it just “media”?

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social media, word cloud

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Whether, as some surveys show, Americans who use social media really spend more time on it than on any other Internet activity—including email—they do spend a lot of time there. A 2013 survey pegged that at an average of 3.2 hours a day. Social media have become integral to the marketing strategies of many organizations and businesses, and marketing professionals spend the most time there. A free industry report says a quarter of marketers spend six to 10 hours a week on social media activities—finding and posting content, analyzing efforts, scoping out the competition—and a third spend 11 hours or more.

Small businesses, especially, struggle with the time commitment to social. They’d like to cut back. But how? This interesting article from Buffer has some suggestions, as well as revealing graphics. In total, their ideas add up to saving more than six hours a week. And, here’s where we find out how different the social media experience is for companies who embrace the “media” side of social media and small-time operators like me, who are still clinging to that word “social.”

Significant time-saving, they say, can be achieved by automating your social media posting, and they have some suggestions. This must be what the annoying people on twitter do who have posts every six minutes. Here’s the gist: “buy my book!” “my book is awesome!” “people say so!” I unfollow them. While I want my posts to prompt people to go to my website, yes, but because I wrote something that really captured their imagination, not because I wore them down.

They also suggest budgeting some time every day—maybe a half-hour—for finding content to post. “Setting a time limit makes you more productive,” they say. And they have specific suggestions: five minutes each on twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, five minutes Googling for news, and 10 minutes exploring top niche blogs and websites. There are some useful tips here, though my trolling through publishing, news, and writing websites is one of the greatest benefits of having my own website with its constant hunger for new material. Though sometimes I feel like I know more and more about less and less.