A Most Wanted Man

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Hamburg, port

Hamburg, Germany (photo: wikimedia)

Ambiguity, betrayal, characterization, desire—The ABC’s of John le Carré are all in place and working hard in this new film (trailer here). The setting is the gritty port city of Hamburg, from whence much violence rained down on America—and the dirty water of the first scene is the proper element for the dirty business to come—and the real world of espionage. I won’t say more about the plot. Acting throughout is exemplary. Perfect music.

(Must contrast this with the over-long, deeply implausible, and fundamentally boring Poirot mystery on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery last night. What happened there? I get it that it’s just supposed to be fun. Wasn’t.)

A Most Wanted Man is both movie title and epitaph. John le Carré’s encomium is a must-read. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 90%

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Creativity and the Brain

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brain, creativity

fMRI brain images (photo: en.wikipedia)

Lots of articles about creativity in the current issue of The Atlantic, including a fascinating long report by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen who studies the origins of creativity in the brain and its association with mental illness. She started out in the 1960’s studying people involved with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who had a multigenerational family history of mental disorders and suffered from depression. (Moving interviews with Vonnegut’s son Mark were included in PBS News Hour’s coverage of Andreasen’s research.) Indeed, for many of the writers she studied, “mental illness and creativity went hand in hand.” Suicide was not uncommon. We think Hemingway, Plath, now Williams. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also far down that self-destructive path.

Andreasen began her academic career clutching a doctorate in literature, taught in the University of Iowa’s English Department, and published a book about the poet John Donne. But she chose to return to school in the sciences, hoping that study of the brain would lead her to understand why authors she admired had gone off the rails—and maybe even to help future writers.

She’s worked on two vital questions: “What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?” As in many areas of neuroscience, the development of scanning technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled her to watch the brains of creative people “at work,” and these scans reveal tantalizing clues to her hitherto unanswerable questions.

Earlier work has shown that high IQ is not particularly linked to creativity—“above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity,” she says. If she couldn’t predict creativity from IQ measurement (with all its flaws), she had to find other ways to find subjects for research. She looked for external recognition, which led her to the distinguished faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Interviews rather quickly revealed that mood disorders (depression, mostly) were common among the writers and often ran in families. In fact, about 80 percent of the writers she interviewed had such a mental health history, compared with about 30 percent in her control group and in the population at large.

But how to measure creativity in the brain? After years of pondering this difficulty, Andreasen finally arrived at this insight: “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

She has expanded her study to include creative individuals from the sciences as well as the arts. This inclusion has brought her George Lucas, mathematician William Thurston, and six Nobel laureates from the sciences, in addition to novelist Jane Smiley and a group of young creative achievers. Despite their diverse fields, all these individuals show similar brain processes, revealed in the scans, that differ from the workings of control group members’ brains.

Wearing her psychiatrist’s hat, Andreasen talks with her subjects (creatives and controls) about their growing up, family life, relationships, and creative activities. From these interviews, she’s learned that “Creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work.” She’s studied 26 people so far—13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—and validated the link between mental illness and creativity as well as the evidence that creativity tends to run in families, though it may not confine itself to a single field.

Other traits of the creatives include a personality style that leads them to take risks, confront rejection, and persist. Of course, she says, “Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path,” and may in itself contribute to mental illness. Many creative people are autididacts—they love to teach themselves—and polymaths, with a wide variety of diverse interests. This holds true despite out education system’s persistent separation of the arts and the sciences. “If we wish to nurture creative students,” Andreasen says, “this may be a serious error.”

She closes by referring to the case of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia (and who lives around the corner from me), profiled in the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.”

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In Summer, All the World’s a Stage

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Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Learned Ladies, outdoor stage

Learned Ladies stage set (photo: author)

Outdoor theatre has tremendous pleasures—and perils. For once, the sun wasn’t broiling last Saturday when we saw Moliere’s The Learned Ladies at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s outdoor stage (the charming 1932 Greek Theatre at the College of St. Elizabeth). Probably because I had with me the new sun parasol I’d bought in Vancouver! The STNJ does classic comedies in this venue, and the poor actors are always costumed in layer upon layer, wearing wigs—particularly hilarious in this production. It makes you light-headed to look at them.

Planes routinely take off flying low overhead from the small airport is near the theatre. This year, the players responded by yelling “Maestro!”, a harpsichord would play, they’d do some bouncy minuet steps, and a page would run by with a sign reading “Flying Machine Interval” until the noise subsided. Got a laugh every time.

I was in Regent’s Park, London, at a performance of The Tempest as a real storm approached, frightening the unprepared audience members, and at a performance of Doctor Faustus at Wolf Trap, when a giant Washington summer lightning-and-thunder extravaganza broke, just as the devil appeared (nervous laughter). We lived near a tiny outdoor theatre in Arlington, Virginia, where we could push our stroller and lurk near the back if a hasty departure was needed. We saw a sweet production of Carousel there. Baby slept.

Shakespeare is a staple of summer theaters, though many do history plays, and some do musicals or religious plays. Almost 1.4 million Americans attended an outdoor performance in 2013, according to 67 reporting members of the Institute of Outdoor Theatre (hardly a complete sample).

“An evening on the turf (is) real in a way indoor performances are not. We may think we’re distracted when we notice the pair of bunnies seated next to the stage earnestly observing the bipeds, but we’re actually becoming aware of the whole environment in which theater takes place,” said Kelly Kleiman in a comment on Chicago’s theater scene. And, you can have fireworks—onstage and off!

fireworks

(photo: Adam Baker, flickr, cc)

“Pulling the trigger is easy”

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Russian missile, Malaysia Airlines

Russian Buk missiles (photo: wikipedia)

Discovery of “shrapnel-like holes” on pieces of the fuselage of downed Malaysia Airlines flight 17 adds to evidence suggesting it was shot down using Russian Buk missile technology (which NATO calls the SA-11). A Wired article by Alex Davies reveals just how easy that would be. Says Davies, “The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system.” The system is mobile, as it was designed to protect troops near the front line from fighter jet attacks. It can hit targets up to twenty miles away and higher than 70,000 feet. It requires a crew of just four.

Once the system is set up, that crew doesn’t need much training to use it. It’s knowing what to fire at that takes the skill, because “the SA-11’s radar system shows the same ‘blip’ for all different targets,” Davies writes. He quotes Paul Huter a Lockheed-Martin aerospace engineer: “Once the radar picks up a target, it is a matter of telling the system that it should engage the target and issuing a fire command.” Another interviewee compared it to firing a gun. “Pulling the trigger is easy. Judgment is hard.”

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*****Down by the River

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drugs, El Paso, Rio Grande, narcotraficantes, DEA, Border Patrol, Mexico, Texas

U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Rio Grande (photo: c1.staticflickr)

By Charles Bowden. Investigative reporter Bowden has produced a number of excellent nonfiction books, and this 2002 book about the porous U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and the heavy traffic in drugs and violence spanning the Rio Grande there–was highly regarded from the start. Since it’s a dozen years old, as I read, I couldn’t help hoping the situation has improved. Ample recent evidence here, here, and here, suggests it has not, and ongoing drug-related violence throughout the Central American region is a principal reason its children are fleeing here.

The rivalry, lack of cooperation, and mutual undermining of DEA, FBI, and CIA agents in their interactions with the corrupt Mexican hierarchy clouded any comprehensive understanding of the problem and precluded any effective action. When one of these government agencies would get the goods on a bad guy, another would put on the brakes, maybe because the man was one of their thousands of snitches–an always shaky investigational strategy, as any TV watcher knows–or maybe for some other reason. The Mexican drug lords outflanked the clueless American agents at every turn, playing one against the other.

Bowden had no idea it would take eight years to sieve the truth from the slurry of lies and to assemble the fragments of this accounting from hints, scattered news reports, reportorial digging, and conversations with people afraid to talk. He doesn’t discuss the risks to himself, but they had to be industrial grade. He frames the whole convoluted, vague, and hopelessly tangled mess with the story of the death of one 26-year-old El Paso man, Bruno Jordan. Jordan’s family lives close to a border bridge, dangerous Ciudad Juarez crowded up to the Rio Grande’s opposite bank. Jordan was shot down in a K-Mart parking lot in what the police claimed was a car-jacking by a 13-year-old boy, and what his family believes was a hit. Bruno had nothing to do with drugs, but his older brother headed the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center and, in the course of his career, had rubbed a great many of the vindictive and ultra-violent narcotraficantes the wrong way.

The cupidity and corruption of Mexico’s elected leaders, the federal police, the army, and every “get tough on drugs” task force they set up is old news now, but the extent of it is nonetheless shocking. According to a source Bowden cites, when Vincente Fox became president, one of his cabinet members said, “All of our phones, faxes and e-mails are monitored by the narcos. We are surrounded by enemies. We cannot attack corruption unless Washington ends its indifference to wrongdoing by the Mexican elite.” But Washington ignored it, for political reasons of its own, and instead, for decades, has touted the phony War on Drugs.

confiscated drug money

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

While the people live in poverty and terror, the drug czars live in multimillion-dollar mansions, protected by gun-toting federales. One provincial governor cracked down on the drug lords who live in luxury and some safety in his prisons (operating their networks unimpeded, of course), by decreeing they could no longer have Jacuzzis in their cells. At the time of Bowden’s writing, Northern Mexico was essentially a lawless region where the amounts of money are so huge that anyone can be bought. According to the DEA, in 1995 Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s Juarez-based cartel alone was generating approximately $200 million every week.) With cash flow like that, the Mexican government couldn’t afford to shut it down if it wanted to. “Unsuspecting” U.S. and European banks launder perhaps $.5 to $1 trillion dollars a year of this dirty money. Have an account at Citibank?

U.S. law enforcement and border officials may not be corrupt individuals, but everyone they must deal with is likely to be, or might be, today, or another day. In a 2013 interview Bowden talked about the continued violence and murder in Mexico, spawned by Americans’ drug habits, and how this violence is routinely ignored by politicians, bankers, and others who wink-wink don’t ask where the money comes from, calling it “the willful ignorance of the US press covering Mexico. The Mexican press is terrorized. The U.S. press does not like to challenge power.”

Author Charles Bowden died August 30, 2014, at his Las Cruces, New Mexico, home.

Mother Jones encomium and other excellent links.

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***The Killing Floor

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Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

Scottsdale, Arizona, Heat

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Heard Museum, Scottsdale, Arizona, Lego

(photo: author)

Spent five days in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week. With the thermometer at 110°, I spent most of the time indoors. You can take a long walk in a big hotel, through and around the conventioneers. In this instance, they were at-home businesswomen—“women with projects!” a cousin said—though the company they are franchisees of is owned by men. The lobby included displays of live rattlers and a Gila monster. Every time I passed them, I did a census; they slept a lot.

The Heard Museum and its terrific Native American collection seems to get better all the time. In a gesture toward younger museum-goers, it was promoting some hands-on Lego activities, and created a Lego model of the museum (above). Docents there receive more than a hundred hours of training, so provide a lot of helpful background and interpretation.

Scottsdale is named for Winfield Scott (you have to click that link to see an example of web design gone amok. There actually is writing on the page.), a minor leader in the Civil War and army chaplain, not the famous, long-serving general Winfield Scott (“Old Fuss and Feathers”) who served in the War of 1812 and ran for President. Glad to clear that up. Plan to share your dinner if you order the ribs at the Old Town Tortilla Factory. They were tasty, but enough for one of Scott’s army units.

turquoise, silver, jewelry, earrings

(photo: author)

I had a couple of pieces of silver and turquoise jewelry with me that needed repair, since the only thing the local silver shop in Princeton has a goodly supply of is excuses why it cannot do this or that. Scottsdale’s Old Town Trading Company claims to have the area’s only Native American jeweler on site—as well as beautiful new pieces. He fixed me up and gave my vintage screwback earrings a thorough polish. Excited to wear them now.

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****Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen

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English history, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII

Book Cover and Matching Lamp (photo: author)

By Giles Tremlett – An excellent, well researched and highly readable biography that breathes life into the woman Henry was married to for 24 years—longer than all his other wives put together. As The Guardian says, “Catherine of Aragon tends to get shuffled into the Prologue, something to be rushed through as quickly as possible. You can’t help feeling, along with Henry himself, that things would be so much pacier if only Spanish Catherine would hurry up and cede her place to that home-grown minx, Anne Boleyn.”

But Catherine stuck it out, refusing to be divorced from Henry and finally dying, abandoned and isolated from court—though still much-loved by the common people. Her death freed Henry of Anne, as well, and only 19 weeks later Anne of the Waspish Tongue was beheaded. Neither woman produced a male heir, a persistent frustration for Henry.

Catherine was well prepared to be a staunch defender of the Catholic principles that underlay her opposition to the divorce, even though she feared she and her daughter Mary might themselves be executed. She had powerful parents, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to serve as role models. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was her nephew to whom she sent pleas for support. Catherine’s ultimate decision not to goad Charles into war was “possibly as important as any other she made,” says Tremlett.

The impact of Catherine and Henry’s marriage still reverberates. She petitioned the Pope for aid, and his support, albeit tardy, led to Henry’s assertion of his authority over the church, the schism with Rome, and formation of the Church of England. In her five-year reign, Catherine’s daughter Mary (“Bloody Mary”) attempted to restore the Church, perpetuating the religious crisis, and it was left to Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth I to complete the Reformation.

Tremlett’s descriptions of the political to-and-fro, court life for insiders and outsiders, and the place of women in Tudor society create living, breathing—and unforgettable—characters at this massive historical turning point.

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Put the Cat Out

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Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

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“The Gatekeepers” Redux

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Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, Middle East conflict

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Fred Kaplan’s important Slate article this week about Israeli leaders’ apparent inability to think strategically about its worsening situation—at home and in the world—included a reference to the superb documentary of 2013, The Gatekeepers, originally reviewed here 3-18-13. That review is, alas, increasingly relevant, and here it is.

Saw the amazing documentary, The Gatekeepers, yesterday. It reviews the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes and words of all six surviving directors of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency. Old footage of the Six-Day War in 1968—after which Israel annexed the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza—and subsequent events—the bus bombings, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the intifadas, pinpoint bombings of Palestinian targets, meetings brokered by President Clinton—all roll on hopelessly toward the present stalemate.

To a man, these former spy chiefs, who have studied the Israeli security situation closer than anyone else, believe the hardline strategy has been a mistake, that fighting when Israel should have been working for peace has made the country less safe, not more. Continued saber-rattling takes its toll on every one of them, and their childhood dreams of a peaceful Israel have turned into a nightmare for everyone, Israeli and Palestinian alike. As one said, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This line from the New York Times review is especially apt. “It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.”

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