Worlds of trouble

Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City really is extraordinary - a must-read. Now I just have to figure out whether I should buy it for various family members in hardcover or Kindle! The appendix in particular is quite amazing - the last book that had me so close to tears at the end, I think, was Ken Bruen's The Dramatist. It was also interesting finishing just after having read William Wells Brown's also rather amazing novel Clotel; the historical continuities are striking and disturbing, and really I think I need to read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow now too.

Read another very sad book over the weekend, it made me feel mournful enough that I slightly regretted ever having embarked on reading the trilogy in the first place, though they are very good and I really do recommend them - that's Ben Winters' final installment in the series that began with The Last Policeman, World of Trouble.

Closing tabs

Abandoned swimming pools.

At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on two new Keats biographies, with interesting more general thoughts on the literary biographer's dilemma.

Emily DePrang on what happened to one man put on Texas's sex offender registry for an offence committed when he was twelve. (And sequel.)

How to create cartoons.

Honey laundering. (Courtesy of B.)

Love letters

The Florestine Collection in New Orleans.

Taste, colour and set

It is perhaps not quite blog-worthy, there is nothing absolutely and wildly over-the-top about it, but I was mildly fascinated by this FT piece about Britain's recent marmalade revival (site registration required) and the Marmalade Awards website.

(There is also a prize for Marmalade Cat of the Year!)

My fridge is absolutely bare, I threw out almost everything in fridge and cupboards when leaving the place for subletters in May (I believe this should be done periodically in any case, otherwise aged things pervade!); I believe the purchase of new jams and marmalades is in order...

Entirely unrelated: a rather fantastic Wikipedia biography of British doctor and mass-murderer John Bodkin Adams. (He was convicted, among other things, of the wonderfully named offense "lying on cremation forms"!) This link arrived from my father, who is reading D. R. Thorpe's biography of Harold Macmillan and delighting in the way Macmillan's life seemed to intersect with all sorts of unexpected figures...

Saw an excellent play last night with G. at the Flea Theater, British group Pants on Fire's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Altogether charming! I think my favorite bits were Io's story (amazing use of gas mask and tap shoes to transform Io into a cow, and a beautifully written and performed song after her transformation back into a girl) and the song about Theseus's black sails, but both the material and the production are excellent: particularly inventive use of puppetry and modest sets to do all sorts of amazing and unexpected things. Lovely stuff!

And then we had a beautiful dinner at Petrarca, which has somehow by stealth and excellence become one of my favorite restaurants, so it was the rare occasion when dinner and the play were both exceptional; we shared a bottle of verdicchio and the amazing piatto rustico, a generous platter of prosciutto and salami and parmesan and so forth, then G. had spaghetti and meatballs and I had seared sesame-crusted tuna with asparagus. Topped off, though I was already rather full, by the Amarena: vanilla gelato with amarena cherries. It was delicious.

Murder most gruesome

Exploding toad case solved.

"Like Sophia Loren, and equally difficult to catch"

The mysterious death of a giant carp (courtesy of Julia).

Trick memory

Luc Sante on the Thirteen Most Wanted.

"On to Z!"

Celeste Headlee on the pleasures of the Dictionary of American Regional English (via Bookforum):

[W]hen this reporter tested out some words from the DARE at a Starbucks in suburban Detroit, none of the patrons seemed familiar with a "monkey's wedding" (a chaotic, messy situation in Maine); "cockroach killers" (pointy shoes in New Jersey) or "mumble squibbles" (noogies, North Carolina-style).

While it's fun to learn about colloquial language, Hall says, there are serious practical uses for the DARE as well. Forensic linguists once used it when a little girl was kidnapped and police had only a ransom note to go on.

"In this ransom note, the writer said, 'Put $10,000 cash in a trash can on the devil's strip,' " Hall says.

The key phrase in the note was "devil's strip," a term used only in a tiny section of Ohio to refer to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. As it happened, one of the suspects on the police list was a man from Akron. After being confronted with the evidence, linguistic and otherwise, the man ultimately confessed.

Doctors also use the DARE to understand patients who use colorful language to describe their illnesses. A patient complaining of "the groundage" or "pipjennies" likely has a rash on the feet or pimples.

It is not funny, but...

... honey noir!

Bloodsongs

At the Independent, John Walsh on William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac's early collaborative novel about a real-life murder committed by one of their friends in Riverside Park. (Thanks to Tarvo for the link.)