Holiday Favorites!

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Nutcracker, Christmas

(photo: wikimedia)

“Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins 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.

See this photo gallery: China’s Harbin Ice Festival.

“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 28 from The Pickwick Papers.

Antiquity Now!’s 12/17 post gives a recipe for Sfeni—yeast doughnuts dipped in honey—a traditional Sephardic Hanukkah dish. Looks pretty yummy! Check out the Antiquity Now! Website throughout the holiday season for more cross-cultural celebrations.

“’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.

Don’t miss the ever-popular YouTube video: “Chinese Food on Christmas”!

Now I’m off to make an eggnog pie. Back in 2016!! Happy New Year! Celebrate with these Dancing Fireworks!

****The White Rock

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Inca Masonry

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By Hugh Thomson – When I was in the 7th grade I came into possession, I cannot recall how, of a pamphlet about the Incas. No more than 20 pages, it was probably not scientifically accurate, especially since understandings about this civilization have evolved considerably since it was published, primed with new discoveries and interpretations, but it seized hold of my imagination, and I’ve never recovered. The Incas built on the achievements of previous groups to extend their empire throughout the high Andes, establishing looser affiliations with trading partners in the jungles and on the coast, until their offhand destruction by the Pizarro brothers in the 1500’s.

No surprise, then, I was easy prey to the charms of The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland, which tells of TV documentarian Hugh Thomson’s several bold trips through Inca country as a young man in his twenties and, after waiting out the passing plague of the ultra-violent Shining Path movement, his renewed adventures seeking as-yet unexplored and under-explored Inca cities, including Old Vilcabamba, the last jungle redoubt of the last Sapa Inca, Tupac Amaru. Thomson weaves into his narrative the history of the Incas and the state of native Peruvians today. The book contains several maps (which could have been keyed to his journeys), a glossary, and welcome photographs.

Inca stairs, Emmanuel Dyan

(photo: Emmanuel Dyan, Creative Commons license)

The possibility of new discoveries yet to be made is part of the continuing appeal of Andean exploration. The conquistadors were so intent on acquiring gold and silver that they ignored everything else, and Peru “is one of the few places left in the world where new ruins continue to be discovered,” says Thomson.

Because the Inca had no written language, and because their arts were destroyed by the fires of smelters or simple desecration, their remaining stone buildings, having stood half a millennium or more, are a stubborn, silent testament to their achievements.

This book is a tribute to the adventurers who are looking up, up to the mountains, following the ancient Inca roads. Well beyond the Machu Picchu overrun by tourists lies a world of still-unknown cities and outposts. Overlooked in the days of human betrayal, and sometimes hidden by encroaching nature, the old Inca roads and stone stairs beckon.

The Theory of Everything

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Stephen Hawking, Eddie Redmayne , Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

Eddie Redmayne & Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

The uplifting Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (trailer) is well worth seeing. The basic outlines of the story are well known. In his student days at Cambridge, Hawking developed a neuromotor disease that affects the body, not the brain, and was given two years to live. Such a diagnosis would end the ambitions of most people, but he survived to become preeminent in the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology with numerous British and international honors, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor.

Hawking also has tried to make the complexities of the physical sciences accessible for non-scientists, and his book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies. I have the Illustrated edition, and I’ve read it, picture captions and all. (So, I actually know what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is: let’s see, you can know the speed of an object or its location, but you cannot know both at the same time. Please, no questions.)

Eddie Redmayne is superlative as Hawking, and Felicity Jones convincing as his devoted first wife, Jane. The film avoids the typical mawkishness traps, in large part because, as Rene Rodriguez says in the Miami Herald, “Redmayne keeps you focused on the soul of a man trapped inside a malfunctioning body.” The supporting cast is singularly excellent too.

The movie is based on a book written by Jane, whom Hawking met at Cambridge shortly before the neurological problems began to surface. The couple have three children, and he is portrayed as a loving father. It ends some 25 years later, in the late 1980s.

There’s only a smattering of science and mathematics in the movie; in general, it’s about coping against greater odds than a person can at all reasonably be expected to overcome. The movie suggests, not unreasonably, that Jane’s determination was a significant factor in keeping him alive. Not just surviving, thriving. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 84%.

Comfortable Ambiguity

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keyhole, shoes, Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu

(photo: Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu, Creative Commons license)

A novel should leave “a little room for the reader to interpret, to bring in his or her own perceptions and conceptions,” says Celeste Ng in a recent Glimmer Train essay. Ng’s novel, Everything I Never Told You is one of NPR’s “Great Reads” for 2014 and has been selected by the Amazon editors as the #1 book of the year. Ng’s essay suggests we can look through the keyhole, we can see the pink velvet shoes, but we may never know everything about them, so we fill in the rest of the story to our own pasts, preconceptions, and predilections.

In her “literary thriller,” Ng artfully leaves room for interpretation of the events leading to the disappearance of a family’s daughter. A familiar premise, but “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now,” says Alexander Chee in the New York Times, as she turns “the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won’t share.”

There’s a difference between the deliberate ambiguity Ng advocates—“a space, however small, for the reader to fit into the piece”—and simple confusion. The challenge is to walk the tightrope between answering every question and leaving out important information about character, motivation, or even plot that the reader needs in order to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. As a writer of mystery and thriller stories myself, I am constantly aware of that tightrope and the expectations of readers in this genre.

Discomfort with ambiguity leads to such devices as the flash-forward epilogue “that tells you exactly where everyone ends up and what everything means.” This was my one quibble with the otherwise lovely novel All the Light We Cannot See. Movies do this, too. In general, I find this trick disappointing, because by the time I reach the end of a book or compelling movie, I have a rich array of ideas about the potential future lives of the characters, and the novelist/moviemaker can pick only one of these.

Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Preoccupation with, you could say, “closure,” may not be simply a response to ambiguity per se, Ng proposes, “but to ambiguity done badly.” If ambiguity results from the writer’s own indecision, she says, then it often doesn’t work. If the writer is relying on readers to sort out the evidence and arrive at a conclusion, “the reader senses that crucial pieces are missing and ends up confused.” When the writer knows how the situation resolves, but simply chooses not to say, like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, “a modest monument to the bold pursuit of ambiguity,” said poet Brad Leithauser. The ambiguity in that novel has sparked 116 years of speculation, a level of interest that likely wouldn’t have occurred, had James made it perfectly clear whether the governess was delusional.

In the batch of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine stories I reviewed 12/12/14 was one by Joyce Carol Oates (“Equatorial”) in which the timid wife of a much-married man grows to believe he’s trying to kill her. Evidence mounts that he might want to be rid of her. He seems, a time or two, to try. But then he injures himself and the imbalance in physical strength between them tips slightly in her direction. She takes a risk to further even the odds. The story ends as the two sides of this interpersonal equation teeter on the brink. Will he succeed, or will she? The ending is classically ambiguous, and Oates has given sufficient information for readers to plausibly choose either ending.

Everything I Never Told You ends without telling exactly what happens to its characters outside the bounds of the book, and readers ask Ng about them. At first such questions made her worry she’d left out some key bit of information, but then she realized that readers believe they know the characters and are firmly convinced about what happens to them. What they wanted from Ng was “to confirm what ‘really’ happened—because they wanted to be right!—but all of them were already positive that they knew.”

It is these readers’ “intense and comfortable certainty” that shows she left sufficient ambiguity for readers to take hold and give the story their own meaning. “The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.”

See how she does it!

***Three Ellery Queens

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Green Door, Arizona

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

The three latest Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines contain 31 short stories—historical, locked room, humorous, and many other splinter categories from U.S. and international authors. Reaching into this Santa’s bag of offerings, I’ll pull out some of my favorites:

  • “The Lure of the Green Door” by Norizuki Rintarō is a locked room mystery featuring a Japanese sleuth named, yes, Norizuki Rintarō and his humorously prickly girlfriend Sawada Honami. Says EQMM, he’s part of the “new traditionalist” movement in Japanese mystery writing, emphasizing puzzles, and he’s put together a good one here! (11/14)
  • Suzanne Arruda’s “Deep Shaft” effectively conjures Prohibition-era Kansas and the trouble city slicker outsiders can get themselves into. She’s the author of the mystery series featuring adventuresome, world-traveling photojournalist Jade Del Cameron Mysteries set in WWI and the 1920s. (11/14)
  • “Getaway Girl,” by Zoë Z. Dean, her first published story and one with a great last line: “there was something terrifying about a girl that good at living.” (11/14)
  • Joyce Carol Oates’s equivocal “Equatorial” is an accomplished cat-and-mouse game, but who is which? (12/14)
  • “Concrete Town” by Michael Wiley is set mostly in a bar, perhaps inspired by work on his irresistibly titled detective novel, The Bad Kitty Lounge. (12/14)
  • Another first story, “Chung Ling Soo’s Greatest Trick,” by Russell W. Johnson, was most entertaining, but then, I like mysteries featuring magicians! (1/15)
  • Accomplished novelist Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote the tension-filled “Christmas Eve at the Exit” about a woman’s attempted escape from an abusive husband. (1/15)

Always something to admire in these EQMM collections! Available in many bookstores and digitally.

Reading Pathways

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path, forest, jungle

(photo: wikimedia)

After listening to Stephen King’s mind-bending 11/22/63: A Novel, and reading his book of advice for writers (reviewed here), I’m willing—eager, actually—to read more. But my tolerance for the horror genre is limited, and he’s written, a gazillion books, so where do I start?

You may feel the same way about Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby, James Baldwin, China Miéville, or other notables. The folks at Book Riot see our confusion and want to help. They’ve created “Reading Pathways” for 34 notable authors that introduce the works of great authors in a thoughtful, non-random way.

Their three-book selections are geared to encourage affection for the writers’ best and most accessible works, so that new readers will want to keep going. I tested their method with the Reading Pathway for Charles Dickens, since I have read or listened to every one of his novels at least once. And their advice was pretty good.

But Book Riot doesn’t just cover authors you’ve heard of forever and the musty fusty classics. David Foster Wallace is here, as is Zadie Smith. A little sci-fi and fantasy, too.

A New Year is coming up. Maybe it’s time to follow a new Reading Pathway! Me, I’ll be reading King’s Under the Dome. Does that sound  like the right first step to you?

Life of Crime

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John Hawkes & Jennifer Anniston, Life of Crime

John Hawkes & Jennifer Anniston, Life of Crime

Netflixed this 2014 comedy (trailer), which slipped into and out of theaters this fall faster than a rumor. It’s based on Elmore Leonard’s novel, The Switch. Directed by Daniel Schechter, it features Jennifer Aniston (Mickey), Mos Def (Ordell), John Hawkes (Louis), and a strong supporting cast. (Several characters, including the two male leads were revisited in Quentin Tarantino’s considerably more violent Jackie Brown, based on another Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch.)

Much more The Ransom of Red Chief than Fargo, Life of Crime is about a kidnapping gone wrong. Louis and Ordell snatch trophy-wife Mickey only to find out her husband (Tim Robbins) is on the verge of divorcing her anyway. If they carry out their threats to kill her, they’ll save him millions in settlement costs.

Much of the humor comes from the bumbling characters who muddy the kidnappers’ scheme. They’ve sought the help of a Nazi-loving nut case (Mark Boone Junior) who has a spare room where they can stash Mickey, and she is pursued by a hapless and creepily smitten tennis club dad (Will Forte). The only sharp knife in the drawer is the husband’s new girlfriend (Isla Fisher), who’s just too smart for her own good. Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie a 65 percent rating, with critics mostly objecting to low energy, lack of real menace, and perhaps the false expectation of Jackie Brown/Tarantino-style violence. Instead, the film is an “amiable diversion” with “ambling charm.”

(Trivia note: The title may have been changed from Leonard’s original because Aniston starred in a totally different comedy titled The Switch in 2010, and in an eruption of self-referential promotion, the DVD for Life of Crime included previews for both The Switch and Jackie Brown.)

The Book Behind The Imitation Game

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Benedict Cumberbatch, Enigma, The Imitation GameIn wide release this Christmas will be the new film The Imitation Game (trailer), eagerly awaited by all serious fans of cryptography, World War II history-Bletchley Park division, spy stories, the invention of computers, and Benedict Cumberbatch. (My review of the movie.)Last week the author of the book on which the movie is based, Andrew Hodges, spoke here in Princeton. Hodges’s book—“one of the finest biographies of a scientific genius ever written,” said the Los Angeles Times reviewer—is Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film “The Imitation Game” published in 1983 by Princeton University Press, which is congratulating itself heartily over its three-decades’-ago decision.

As you may recall, Alan Turing was the young British scientist (incorrect to label him a mathematical genius, because part of his brilliance was in blending fields—logic, engineering, biology, and mathematics) who led the successful efforts to break the Nazi naval codes in World War II. The machine created to do this was an early computer, and a paper Turing wrote in 1936 laid the foundation for the theory of computer science, by imagining a field that previously did not exist.

In Princeton in 1936-38, he worked on speech-scrambling technology. His interest in these diverse topics led him to an interest in ciphers and artificial intelligence, and these interests led not just to the Turing Test (“the imitation game”), but to Bletchley Park and the team of scientists there. Turing’s pivotal role in the Allied accomplishment, like most information about the unraveling of the Germans’ Enigma machine, was not revealed until the 1970s. Hodges said some of his theories about the connection between mathematics and biology were so advanced they are only now receiving attention in science.

Turing’s homosexuality caused few problems in the tolerant environment of King’s College, Oxford, but after the war, that changed. He held vast amounts of wartime secrets in his head, and it was a period of intense anti-Soviet paranoia. The authorities worried about his vulnerability. He died at age 42 of cyanide poisoning, and Hodges believes the coroner’s conclusion that his death was suicide, although the pressure that may have been brought to bear on him is unknown. He left just enough mystery about his death that his mother could console herself it was one of his science experiments gone wrong and conspiracy speculators could ever since consider it part of the enigma.

Skylight

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Bill Nighy, Carey Mulligan, David Hare, Skylight

Bill Nighy & Carey Mulligan in Skylight

If Britain’s National Theatre Live version of David Hare’s remounted play Skylight, comes to a movie theatre in your area, don’t miss it! It’s a live performance filmed last summer, and, unlike the live opera shown in movie theaters, it isn’t “live, live.” But it isn’t just a camera set up in the back of the theatre, either. There are wonderful closeups of the three actors, and given who the actors are, you want to catch every nuanced facial muscle.

Carey Mulligan plays a 30ish woman (her first stage role), Kyra Hollis, who teaches in what is apparently a rather desperate London school and lives in rather minimalist circumstances in a British public housing flat, of a type familiar from U.K. crime shows. She’s visited by a young man—played briefly and brilliantly by Matthew Beard—who is the son in a family she once lived with. The young man urges her to return to try to help his father, who he says is lost in grief and rage over his wife’s death a year before. The son departs, and the father arrives.

Played flawlessly by Bill Nighy, the father is a successful restaurateur for whom Kyra once worked, and the sparring between the two over why she left his home and her work, the new life she’s constructed, and what was and is between them carries the rest of the play. When it was first produced in 1995, Skylight won the Olivier Award for Best New Play. Many funny moments. Tears, too.

“Where the West (Still) Begins”

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Lest you think Fort Worth has nothing more to offer than cowboy culture and steak, here’s the lowdown on its Culture, Characters, and Community!

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington, Amon Carter Museum

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington (wikimedia.org)

Culture

Fort Worth’s Cultural District includes three art museums notable for their architecture as well as their art. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, designed by Philip Johnson, was founded to display Carter’s collection of pieces by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

Boatmen on the MIssouri, George Caleb Bingham

Boatmen on the Missouri, G. C. Bingham (wikimedia)

It now houses more than 200,000 objects, many of which are classics. They run the gamut of American artists and include a newly acquired full-length portrait of actor Edwin Booth by John Singer Sargent. A special exhibit on the work of George Caleb Bingham (through 1/18/15), documenting 1800s life on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers uses modern Xray techniques to discover how these iconic paintings were assembled.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Louis I. Kahn

Kimbell Art Museum (wikimedia)

The adjacent Kimbell Art Museum comprises two buildings—one with beautifully vaulted spaces designed by Louis I. Kahn, which opened in 1972, and the other a Renzo Piano-designed pavilion used for special exhibitions. Currently on view in the latter is a popular showing of Impressionist portraits. There simply wasn’t time to visit the visually striking Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth or much of the Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Bass Performance Hall, Fort WorthThe downtown has preserved some of its rich architecture, including an impressive collection of Art Deco buildings. Helpful plaques explain many of these buildings’ history and interesting design elements. However, the three-dimensional exterior of downtown’s  Bass Performance Hall has to be the most jaw-dropping, with the angels’ trumpets extending waaaaay out into the street.

 

Characters

Two daytrips took us away from Fort Worth. In one, my cousin and I revisited the tiny town of Loving, Texas, where our great-grandparents settled in 1906, and a classic “wide spot in the road.” There’s little left but the cemetery, although the town claims a population of about 300. Loving is named for the family of Oliver Loving, who with Charles Goodnight developed the Goodnight-Loving Trail, used to drive cattle from Texas to New Mexico for the Army and on to Denver. Oliver Loving was wounded in a Comanche attack on one of these expeditions and died at Fort Sumner in New Mexico.He extracted a promise from Goodnight to bury him in Texas, and this episode was one inspiration for Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove.

Sam Rayburn museum and library, Bonham, Texas

Sam Rayburn museum and library

Our second sidetrip, through some beautiful north Texas countryside, was to Bonham, Texas, and the library, home, and burial site of Sam Rayburn. Rayburn, from an American political era that now seems almost unimaginably collegial, served 48 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was Speaker for 17 years. Brochure: “Rayburn’s fairness and mastery of the political process earned him respect from both sides of the House floor.”

And, another reason to go to Bonham that shouldn’t be discounted is the opportunity to have lunch at the Hickory Bar-B-Que on Sam Rayburn Drive!

President and Mrs. Kennedy spent the night of November 21, 1963, in the Presidential suite of our Fort Worth hotel (which our room’s windows looked out on). It was raining on the morning of the 22nd, but the President saw a crowd gathering, and went downstairs to greet people. Seeing them standing there in the wet, he said, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth.” Those words are inscribed on a memorial to Kennedy adjacent to the hotel, and the hotel itself contains numerous photographs from that visit. He and Mrs. Kennedy attended a breakfast at the Chamber of Commerce before leaving on the disastrous trip to Dallas.

2014-11-27 08.51.09

 

Community

Fort Worth - Loving 11-2014 024Philip Johnson designed a spectacular water garden in the old Hell’s Half Acre district, behind the Fort Worth Convention Center, a surprising urban feature that includes a quiet pool, cataracts of water (photo), and a sure-fire winner for any “most delightful use of fountains” award. The Japanese Garden at the Botanic Gardens is another urban getaway, with elegant vistas at every turn.

Fort Worth - Loving 11-2014 045

Even the best laid trip plans sometimes confront the unexpected, and so we learned that Fort Worth’s annual holiday “parade of lights” would pass the back of our hotel on the day set aside for museum visits. This meant we had to return to the hotel early before the streets were closed. We watched the parade for more than an hour and over a hundred entries before requiring nourishment. It was amazing that there were any Fort Worth residents left to crowd the street as onlookers, there were so many people in the parade—on horses, in cars (antique and sports), on floats, in bands, in informal marching groups of indeterminate origin, in Shriner assemblages, on fire trucks, you name it. But the most hilarious entry was the one that led the parade: the black-pompadoured “World Famous Wheelie-ing Elvi.” Good Rocking Tonight!

(photo: twfwe)

(photo: twfwe)