Category Archives: The Morgue

Will Men Read My Book?

Posted on by
reading

(photo: Nico Cavallotto, Creative Commons)

Something else to worry about on the rocky road to publication: The Goodreads analysts have crunched the site’s numbers to explore the reading habits of their male versus female members. You can see the results in this nifty Infographic. My home page includes a button indicating I’m a member of Sisters in Crime, started by women crime and suspense writers who thought 20 years ago (and still do) that women crime writers get the short end of the stick in book reviews and other ways. The text of the Goodreads post says that’s still true for book reviews generally.

Key messages from the Infographic: women are twice as likely as men to read a recent book, and men are twice as likely to write (is that a typo?) a 500+-page book. In the first year after a book is published, a male writer’s audience will split 50-50 along gender lines, whereas a woman writer’s audience will be 80 percent female.

This new finding tracks with a 2005 study that found four out of five men (academics, critics, and writers) said the last novel they’d read had a man as author, whereas women in the study were equally likely to have most recently read a novel written by a man or a woman. Whatever they read in 2014, according to Goodreads, men and women both rated the books by women a bit higher.

A 2012 Wall Street Journal article quoted a Penguin editor as saying: “For a new author, we want to avoid anything that might cause a reader to put a book down and decide, ‘not for me.’ When we think a book will appeal to male readers, we want everything about the book to say that—the cover, the copy and, yes, the author’s name.” Which is why we had J.K., not Joanne Rowling. And why women still write under men’s—or at least ambiguous—names. [For a survey of this and other types of literary masquerade, try Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.]

Finally, Goodreads looked at the 50 books published in 2014 that men most often read, and found that only five were by women. Three of these fall into the fantasy-science-fiction-dystopia world of teen lit, one is young adult, and the last—The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is a feel-good tale about a bookstore owner for whom everything looks grim, but then “magically” becomes more than OK (judging by the blurb). Go ahead, call me a snob, but I laughed out loud when I read the tagline for one of the fantasy books: “Erchomai, Sebastian had said. I am coming.”

Similarly, of the 50 books published in 2014 most often read by women, only five were by men (that is, if you count J.K. Rowling’s Robert Galbraith persona). The books by men that women mostly read were young adult fantasy, adventure fantasy, Galbraith’s The Silkworm, Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, and a book I read and liked, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.

If you’re wondering, out of the 41 books I’ve read so far this year, 29 (71 percent) are by men—partly reflecting my genre reading choices (mystery, thriller). So, what about your reading, and do you (know you) care whether the author is a man or woman?

Elena Kagan

Posted on by
Elena Kagan

Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan with President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden (photo: wikimedia.org)

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan, a graduate of Princeton University’s Class of ʼ81, spoke informally yesterday with University President Christopher L. Eisgruber. Unlike the other Ivy schools, Princeton doesn’t have a school of law (or medicine), and Kagan obtained her legal training at Harvard Law, where she was later the school’s first female dean. Nevertheless, she told the crowd filling Richardson Auditorium that “whatever I learned about writing, I learned here.”

Eisgruber, also a lawyer (University of Chicago), asked Kagan about rumors she goes hunting with Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. It dates back, she says, to her pre-confirmation interviews with Senators in 2010. Since they couldn’t ask her directly what she believes about specific cases and laws, they resorted to indirect stratagems to feel her out. A western Senator asked, “Do you hunt?” She explained she was from New York City. “Do you know anyone who does hunt?” Not that, either. But she promised that, if confirmed, she’d have “Nino” take her. In 82 interviews, “It was the only promise I made,” she said.

In her judicial decision-making, she said she often returns to the intent of the framers, but that can lead to untenable results in the modern world. She also looks at judicial history over time, “thinking hard” about the precedents for a case. The part of the work she enjoys most is when there is an opportunity for influencing opinion, and the Justices are arrayed around their conference table, trying to sway one another by making strong arguments.

As to the 5-4 split decisions for which the current Court is known, she said 60% of the Court’s decisions are unanimous. Most of the disagreements have to do with how people read some of the law’s and Constitution’s most abstract provisions, and they come about, not because the Court has blind spots in certain areas—gender politics being suggested as one possibility by an audience questioner—but because there are strong arguments on both sides of a question that represent a real clash of values.

Eisgruber asked how she likes being an Associate Justice, and she said “Great gig!”

Johnny Worricker

Posted on by
Bill Nighy, Worricker

Bill Nighy as Worricker (photo: ichef.bbci.co.uk)

If you saw the two Masterpiece Contemporary thrillers starring Bill Nighy (perfect, as ever), chances are we agree they were terrific. If you missed them, Nighy plays MI5 agent Johnny Worricker, on the outs with his bosses and trying to bring attention to the shady dealings of Prime Minister Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes without much hair).

Needless to say, the Powers That Be don’t approve of Worricker’s activities and are seriously looking for him. In the first of the two dramas shown this month, “Turks and Caicos,” he’s chilling out on the islands when he’s spotted by a CIA agent played by Christopher Walken, with his typical opaque style, and you’re never quite sure who’s who and what’s what. Except that Worricker’s former girlfriend, Margo Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter), wastes no time realigning her priorities and jetting down to the Caribbean when he needs her. In the second, “Salting the Battlefield,” Worricker and Tyrell are on the run, and doing a pretty good job of it, too, until family ties threaten to flush them out into the open.

These two productions are followups to 2011’s film with the same characters, “Page Eight,” which lacked only Bonham Carter’s Margo Tyrell. Somehow I missed that program when it was broadcast three years ago. Thanks, Neflix! What makes these dramas so good are the scripts. The screenplays and the direction are by British playwright, theater and film director, and two-time Academy Award nominee David Hare. Says Grantland reviewer Chris Ryan, “If it’s adult contemporary, it’s as good as adult contemporary gets.”

Why I Don’t Eat Octopus

Posted on by
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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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!