Two more

by Ake Edwardsson, Never End and Frozen Tracks. I think these books are very good - though I am also, sadly, more than ever certain that I will never be an author of crime fiction. Which is a pity, because I love it very much indeed!

Midnight oil

Have now read books 2 & 3 in Åsa Larsson's series, and they are spectacularly good - the first one I liked very much, but found a little rough round the edges - these ones, though, are sublime! I highly recommend the series as a whole, in any case (and properly they should be read in sequence): Sun Storm, The Blood Spilt and The Black Path.

Light reading catch-up

I have been reading a funny hodgepodge of things, really; nothing too demanding. (Brain otherwise occupied in thinking about how to get started on the ABCs of the novel, navigating the inevitable wave of end-of-semester stuff [even on sabbatical!], pondering the complexities of readying my apartment for subletters and packing for 6 months of writing and triathloning and lounging and conferencing and socializing in various climes.)

Two young-adult novels, out of mild curiosity to see what the fuss was about: Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Christina Stead's When You Reach Me.

Two paperbacks I bought for lack of anything better at the newsstand in South Station in Boston, Mary Higgins Clark's just-about-adequate Just Take My Heart and Preston & Child's ludicrous Cemetery Dance.

I belatedly realized that all of the books in my pile of mostly Scandinavian crime fiction were about to be due back at the library, so I did triage and read one each by the three major remaining authors as yet untrawled: Kjell Eriksson's The Princess of Burundi (so-so), Ake Edwardson's Sun and Shadow (superb) and Asa Larsson's Sun Storm (perhaps not as accomplished as the preceding book, but extremely compelling in its main character and also in the Kiruna setting, which I loved). Under other circumstances, I am sure I would be perfectly happy to read more Eriksson, but given the constraint of library due dates I think I will go ahead and return those ones and prioritize reading the other two instead...

Sunday miscellany

At Harvard Magazine, Jonathan Shaw has an interesting piece on the university library in the digital age.

The Literary Saloon on the unedifying behavior of Orlando Figes (this includes a good collection of links to pretty much all the coverage of the story as it broke - I do feel his behavior falls into the gray area between character flaws and mental illness, but not in a way that should let him off the hook...).

I saw an absolutely dreadful play last night (that link is to Ben Brantley's review of last year's earlier incarnation of the show) - as G. and I sat there stony-faced amidst a theater full of perplexingly appreciative fans, all I could think was that (a) the performer bore an unnerving resemblance to that very striking photograph of the young Erica Jong and (b) I could hardly imagine a play that more horrifyingly and profoundly offended against all of the canons of taste I hold dear. The high level of competency in performance and production only made it worse, really - I have been rereading Cintra Wilson recently, she is the prime commentator (perhaps with Andrew O'Hagan) on fame and narcissism and I wanted to read the truly scathing review she surely would write of this performance...

(But we had a delicious dinner afterwards at Esca - I had an amazingly succulent brodetto that was mussels, clams and scallops stewed in a white wine broth with fresh peas and sorrel, then a piece of seared yellowtail, and a rhubarb tart for dessert, all accompanied by a very good dry Riesling. It was a decadent and palate-pleasing meal that caused G. to comment that he thought it might be wise if he would switch from reviewing plays to reviewing restaurants!)

On the topic of Cintra Wilson, I will also note that a reread of Colors Insulting to Nature has reminded me that it is truly one of the funniest novels I have ever read. It has a sort of propulsive energy that makes the prose difficult to excerpt without sacrificing something of the appealing roughness, for which reason I offer a four-paragraph sequence from early in the book that shows something of its charms. The second paragraph seems to me perfectly crafted - look at the parenthesis (i.e. think how much less funny and ingenious it would be if the parenthesis started before the words "The worst was") and the pacing; there is no lingering, things move unrelentingly forward without any of that mugging for an audience response that is what is objectionable about much conventionally 'good' comic timing (see aforementioned dreadful play).

Anyway, here is the sequence, with apologies if it represents an infringement of copyright (basically I think everybody should buy this book and read it, alongside The Last Samurai!):

Johnny Budrone had been a promising rodeo bull rider in his youth until a particularly nasty throw crushed one of his vertebrae and tossed the muscles around it into a splintery melange he called "crabmeat." Peppy first saw him performing at the Lucky Seven club with his air gun act; with one in each hand, sporting a pair of yellow-tinted aviator-frame glasses, he would shoot a flurry of pellets into large, formless heaps of white balloons, loudly sculpting them into a kind of pneumatic topiary: rabbit heads, hearts, clubs, spades. The rest of the time he drank alone, a lot, to offset his constant back pain. Being another regular at Bil's Red Turkey, the solitary woman at the other end of the bar, who sometimes had jet-black hair, sometimes auburn, became a compelling enigma. One night Johnny was drunk enough to approach Peppy, who was wearing her Natural Honey Blonde wig, and drawl, "So what's your hair down there like, anyhow"--gesturing at her crotch with his Marlboro--"Neapolitan?"

It was not the best pickup line Peppy had ever heard, nor was it the worst. The worst was: "You wanna come in the john with me and put Bactine on my stump?" (Dan "Claw" Haverman, June 1974.) Johnny's line, at least, suggested a sexually viable man with an active, if tasteless, sense of humor.

Apart from the exploded veins, bowlegs, psoriasis, and gangrenous-looking assortment of blurring tattoos, Johnny was a handsome man, and Peppy felt a warm twinkling in herself that had almost nothing to do with the four or seven Fuzzy Navels she had consumed. The subsequent affair with Johnny Budrone was actually the closest she'd ever come to the kind of ovary-squeezing, sublimely unbearable, ice-cream headache-y love she had imagined as a hormonally exhilarated teen.

"That Johnny knew how to treat a lady," Peppy would sigh, later.

Ace Luggage

Robert Hudson on luggage and the importance of attention to detail in theatrical productions.

Wish lists

I am very late linking to this - I think the event might be coming to an end tomorrow? - but I wanted to draw your attention to a really wonderful project organized by Colleen Mondor. She has set up a program to buy books for two schools on Native American reservations (one Navajo, one Apache) whose kids really don't have any of the reading material available to them that we take for granted, including often only a very haphazard school collection. Here are more details - you can click through to each school's wish list at Powell's and make a purchase, if you are so inclined. (The lists have been really thoughtfully put together in terms of the fit with the kids' tastes and interests.)

An amazing haul

at the library this morning - I am tackling ABCs of the novel initially via Roman Jakobson and Laurence Sterne, but got sidetracked onto Elias Canetti and also the three volumes of Ptolemaic Alexandria, a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without...

Postscript

I heard a very lovely new piece of Nico's at last Friday's concert in the Philharmonic's new music series - Q2 will webcast the whole program (including brief interviews with the three composers) this Thursday at 7pm and Saturday at 4pm, and it will be in their regular programming thereafter.

Alcathoe's bat

Catch-up miscellany (I have been traveling, it throws me off!):

Thumbprint-sized bat discovered in England.

Ancient Roman ingots to provide lead shielding for neutrino detector (thanks to Wendy for the link!).

An edited transcript of my interview of Jonathan Safran Foer for the Literature and Terror series at Columbia.

At the LRB, Jenny Diski on delusionary parasitosis (something I hope I will never experience).

A recent conversation with a friend of my mother's who didn't much like Wolf Hall (which I liked very much indeed) led me to obtain and consume (I will not say devour, they are not quite so delightful to my tastes as that) four crime novels by C. J. Sansom, who seems to be better known in Britain than in the U.S.: Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign and Revelation.

They are not at all bad, they are highly readable, but they caused me to think with considerable grumpiness about how much I dislike the genre of the historical mystery (as opposed to the straight historical novel), especially when it is set in medieval times.

It might just be after-the-fact rationalization of a more visceral dislike, I cannot really say, but the thing that irks me is that though of course crimes must always have been investigated (and Oedipus Rex would be a good example of an early literary work that develops an innovative form to foreground a narrative of investigation and discovery), the narrative protocols of crime fiction are very much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so that it makes a sort of nonsense of the whole business (at the very best a parlor game, at worst a deeply misguided effort in false sensibility) to write about fifteenth-century monks as though they could just be plugged into a P. D. James novel and function.

The first volume in particular gave me a desperate yearning to read some modern stabs at 'real' faux-medieval crime narratives - you would mine Boccaccio and Chaucer and whatever else you wanted for some ideas and then write some really genuinely formally peculiar things that would be (ideally) moving and intellectually gripping but that would look absolutely nothing like the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Medievalists out there? Any ideas? What would the reading list be for a fiction-writer researching such a project (I am not contemplating it myself, I am just curious), and what might the genre of medieval crime tale look like? Are there ones that are readable (in verse or prose), and what are their narrative as opposed to investigative protocols? What about law cases/trials and other forms of narrative of investigation? Adaptations of the story of Cane and Abel or other Biblical crimes? Hmmm, I realize I do not actually have a very clear idea about this, I must investigate - perhaps there is an abstruse but magically interesting academic book at the library that would satisfy my curiosity on these points...

Sea-green incorruptible

At the TLS, a very good piece by Ruth Scurr about Carlyle's French Revolution.

The sabbath

Mr. Softee reaches China:

Mr. Softee or Mr. Soft Heart, the English translation of “ruan xin xian sheng” — there is no Mandarin word for Softee — has been a hit, with sales doubling every year since the first truck started rolling three years ago.

There are now five Mr. Soft Heart trucks in Suzhou, and one in the nearby city of Taicang.

“There is a franchising boom going on in China that is similar to what was happening in America in the 1950s and 1960s, so we really jumped in at the right time,” said Alex Conway, the president of Mr. Softee China, whose grandfather James Conway helped found the company in 1956.

Customers like Meng Xiangbo, 19, a college student, have proved Mr. Conway right. He is a regular customer of the Mr. Softee truck that peddles its treats in Suzhou’s university district.

One recent balmy afternoon, Mr. Meng ordered a kiwi sundae.

“They have six flavors,” he said of the sundaes. “I eat a different one every day. On Sunday, I rest.”

Drowning in honey

James McGirk interviews Lorin Stein for More Intelligent Life. (Via Paperpools.)

The sigh of relief

I started writing the little book on style the last week in February in the grip of a delusion that it might only take me about three weeks; it is based on lectures I wrote (two a week) over the fall semester, and in another sense it's based on a lifetime of reading, so that I felt the hard part was already behind me.

In fact it took longer than three weeks, more like seven, but I have just sent the full manuscript to my agent: it is just under 40,000 words, about a hundred and fifty pages, with a grand total of 31 footnotes.

I really like this little book!

Now it is just a question of waiting to see what happens next, which is not really my forte, but I can get started in the meantime on the ABCs of the novel (formerly known as bread-and-butter of the novel) and also have some seriously grand triathlon training (I'm doing a half-ironman in May and - amazingly - my first full Ironman race in Wisconsin in September).

(It is so crazy, really I am on a mission to stop doing things so much as if under a compulsion, but I feel that by getting this little book done relatively early during my year of sabbatical I have bought myself a bit more breathing space than I usually have - it would be good, though, if I could write most of the other book this year too - I do not know why it should be so much so that I only feel OK when I am madly writing, planning, training, racing, but it is certainly strongly the case...)

Ribs of laughter

Jennifer Michael Hecht on teaching.

Many rivers to cross

My two favorite Wikipedia consultations of the day (a lazy but effective way of making sure what one thinks one knows about a topic is more or less in line with the conventional wisdom!): tilt-shift photography; roman-fleuve.

Also: at io9, Annalee Newitz on five ways the Google Book Settlement will change the future of reading.