Johnny Worricker

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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

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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 Fragrant Harbor

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Hong Kong, city at night

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By Vida Chu – I don’t usually review poetry, it being strictly a case of “I know what I like,” but my friend Vida Chu has published a lovely, evocative collection of 43 poems, The Fragrant Harbor (Hong Kong), and I like it a great deal.

Her poems recall the legends of ancient China and the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, the dislocation of being far from one’s roots and finding home, and the attenuation of family relationships across generations. In beautifully quiet images, she indelibly describes Hong Kong, writing (“Fragrant Harbor”):

The city’s colored lights and stars
Embroider the velvet water.

I especially liked the poems that recall the days of scholars and monks, Emperors and concubines (from “Things I Never Told You About Chinese Painting”):

That Wu Daozi once brushed a huge landscape
onto the palace wall. When he pointed to the grotto
and clapped his hands, the entrance opened.

He stepped inside the painting
and disappeared
in front of the Emperor’s eyes.

The family dynamics Chu describes in many of the poems are universal. What people leave unsaid, the haunting family ghosts, moments of joy (from “Wedding Rain”):

With rings on their fingers
The couple sobbed in each other’s arms
The heavens applauded with a downpour

Like all émigrés, always a bit out of time and place, and in a way that for her has sharpened her perceptions, Chu also describes her roots in America (from “Foreign Students”):

Our lives no longer can be packed in suitcases.
We return to visit as tourists.

We have grown complacent in the rich feeding ground.
We have lost the passion to swim upstream.

This is a collection to read time and again. A special gift for a special person. Yourself? Enjoy!

Joyce Carol Oates: “Not in a Car!”

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Tracy, Hepburn, Adam's Rib

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib (photo: wikimedia.org)

The most specific piece of writing advice I gleaned at the Princeton University event celebrating Joyce Carol Oates’s teaching career last week was this: Never let your characters have a conversation while riding in a car. Her former students laughed in a way that suggested they’d heard this one—and other cliché-avoidance tips—before, more than once.

The event included two panels involving 10 of Oates’s former students—all successfully published writers today—who offered wide-ranging reminiscences about their experiences with their teacher and mentor. In last week’s First Draft blog post, I collected their thoughts on what she taught them about “being a writer.” They also let the audience glimpse a bit of what they learned from her about the craft of writing.

Julie Sarkissian, author of the novel Dear Lucy, long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, recounted how she grounded some of her early writing in her own experiences and how Oates wanted her to separate this work from the lived reality, to make the fiction whole and entire in itself. Apparently the teacher wasn’t swayed at all by Sarkissian’s argument that what she’d written was “true.” Sarkissian learned right then that “the fact that something is true is a pretty pathetic defense when it comes to fiction.”

Is it going too far, then, to say fiction is about lying? Deftly? Another of Oates’s students present was Pinckney Benedict, author of the collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories (my review), and apparently Oates once said something like, “Pinckney seems like the kind of person who would lie to an interviewer.” A startled Benedict found this a revelation: “You can LIE to an interviewer?!” and swore he’s included two or three whoppers in every interview since.

Now I wonder what lies lurk in his excellent Glimmer Train interview from Winter 2013, which has him saying, “I am not trying in my own work to demonstrate that my heart is in the right place because, quite frankly, it is not.” [Is that one?] Trying to establish a common ground with readers—“we’re all well-meaning people together”—he says, “is the antithesis of a powerful or worthwhile literature.” That statement underscores the “don’t pull your punches” approach to writing Oates encouraged in her students.

Former Oates student Jonathan Safran Foer recounted how he’d once turned in a set of pages on which Oates wrote: “Confusing, but uninteresting,” with the latter charge the more piercing. Even unpleasant and essentially boring characters have to be made interesting, she said, in the context of fiction. They become interesting through their uniqueness. (Paradoxically, “The more unlike anyone else you make a character, the more universal that character becomes,” says Donald Maass’s in Writing 21st Century Fiction.) Benedict, originally from rural West Virginia, sets his stories in an Appalachian region so vividly portrayed the reader can reach out and touch the surrounding mountains and smell the barns and fresh-turned earth. In commenting on his skill in this, Oates echoed Maass’s counterintuitive statement, “The regional, if it’s intensely felt, is the universal.”

A conversational thread I especially related to was Oates’s dictum that “Writing is about solving problems.” How do you get this character from here to there (believably)? If you need a character out of the picture a while, where does she go? Why? How to get from here to there is what Oates taught her students. Despite having written more than a hundred books, when she has to identify her profession, “If I have to put it down on some form,” she said, “I write ‘teacher.’”

*** New Jersey Noir

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New Jersey NoirEdited by Joyce Carol Oates. It isn’t a coincidence that I’m reviewing this 2011 book of noir short stories in the middle of two weeks of Sunday blog posts about a celebration of JCO’s teaching. When I knew I was going to the event, I grabbed this book from the “to read” pile.

Noir is distinguished from other types of mystery and suspense fiction by having a protagonist who’s a suspect, a perpetrator, or even a victim—an insider to the situation. Pretty much anyone but a detective/investigator. Often the main characters have a boatload of problems, usually of their own making. My favorite definition of these protagonists is crime writer Dennis Lehane’s: “In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”

I’ve been an “in principle” admirer of Akashic Books’ now lengthy series of place-based noir anthologies, and picked up New Jersey Noir at a local bookstore event, where Oates spoke about it and introduced (I think) one or two of the contributors. Now I’ve finally read it and am disappointed to say many of the 19 stories and poems felt as if they could have happened anywhere.

Sheila Kohler’s creepy “Wunderlich,” for example, is about the bleak territory of aging, not the peculiar dynamic of New Jersey. Various other tales have no more than a whiff of Garden State verisimilitude, which violates the underlying rationale of the series, I’d think. Collectively, these stories hardly scratch the surface of the state’s noir potential, as a glance at any of our daily newspapers would reveal. People in New Jersey fall from curbs like lemmings.

Too many of the stories (for my taste) lean heavily on substance abuse problems, which it won’t surprise the reader to learn cause all kinds of heartache. I rather liked the Bradford Morrow story set in Grover’s Mill, perhaps because I’d just spent considerable creative time there, myself. “Glass Eels” by Jeffrey Ford captures the loneliness of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, but is too similar in action to Robert Arellano’s “Kettle Run.” A story by Oates, “Run Kiss Daddy,” delivers a sufficiently oppressive atmosphere and dark underbelly to be the setup for a longer piece of writing. To me, the most interesting story is Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Too Near Real,” in which the protagonist follows the Google street view vehicle around Princeton, then watches himself “on the map.” Fresh and entertaining.

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.

***How the Light Gets In

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Dionne quints, Louise Penny

The Dionne Quintuplets (photo: wikimedia)

By Louise Penny. Narrated by Ralph Cosham. Louise Penny’s Quebec-based Chief Inspector Gamache novels are wildly popular—this one was nominated for several awards, and it’s the second I’ve listened to. The story’s multilayered plot (no spoilers here) is a mix of the intriguing and barely plausible, but Penny’s characters and setting are nicely developed, not the cardboard cutouts that populate many mysteries. Penny’s first novels initially were called “The Three Pines Mysteries,” and this one brings in the remote village of Three Pines and its clutch of eccentrics quite believably.

In this book, ninth in the series, two investigations are under way. One involves the death of the last of the Ouellet (WEE-lay) quintuplets, modeled on Ontario’s exploited Dionne quintuplets from the same pre-fertility drug era. Penny might have been inspired by the photo of the real Dionne quintuplets, above, in devising a theme for her fictional quints of one being always a bit apart, separate, beginning even before birth.

The other, much shakier plot, is political. It suffers from the stakes-raising trend among mystery writers, who have decided an interesting death or two isn’t enough to capture readers’ attention.

Penny has a habit in this book of withholding from the reader. “He made two telephone calls before leaving the office.” Only later will we find out what those calls were. Use this device once or twice, OK, but it occurs so often, it starts to feel manipulative—I hear the author behind the scenes hammering together cliffhangers.

Apparently Ralph Cosham, who narrates the series, is well regarded for bringing Gamache to life, and he did grow on me a little, but generally I find him plodding. The book’s title comes from fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” I didn’t tumble to the Cohen connection, though I understood the title and the cracks, even without the author’s explanation near the end. Ironically, in a post-story conversation between Penny and Cosham, she talks about the kinds of things that should be left unsaid because “the reader has to do some of the work.” I totally agree, and thought the title, which captured the book’s entire theme, was work I could have done and had done.

****Glimmer Train – Fall 2014

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Jewish man, Miami beach

(photo: by Sagie, Creative Commons license)

Glimmer Train doesn’t usually announce theme issues, except for the “Family Matters” issue, but a clear current in the 11 short stories in this issue is the desires and dislocations of immigrants and the desperation of those who want to immigrate. This is also the issue that includes the wonderful interview with Junot Diaz, covered in part by the First Draft blog.

The frustrations of would-be immigrants are explored in the story “Stowaways,” by Joseph Chavez, in which a man falls from the sky; in the poignant story “Hialeah” by Kim Brooks, about a gathering of Jewish men in Miami, strategizing how to convince the Roosevelt Administration to let a boatload of Jewish refugees land (you’ll remember this real-life episode of the SS Exodus 1947), and “Maghreb and the Sea,” by Robert Powers, which takes on the voice of a would-be African immigrant facing impossible hurdles trying to get to Europe, America—away. Told without dialog, it has the genuine feel of writing from that part of the world.

Other stories tell the trials and uncertainties of people newly in America and the pull of “home.” As author Mehdi Tavana Okasi says in his biosketch, his mother is convinced that, in Iran, he would have become a doctor. “Perhaps she is right. But there is no way to know the other scars I would bear. These are questions that can never be answered, and as immigrants, our lives are filled with them, the what ifs and if only I hads. It’s fantastical and dangerous.” And, thus, the stuff of fiction.

The wide-ranging interview with Junot Diaz also touches on immigration, in his case between the Dominican Republic and the United States. Of the two countries, he says “their shadows fall on each other.” He finds it a useful metaphor because, “all of us are haunted by the other world we call our past.” The immigrant can double down on that haunting.

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!