Sharknado redux?

Well, holy social media, folks: aquatic life has hit the Twitter-dot-com!

First it was news that sharks (or at least nearly 400 of them) in Western Australia are tweeting their location, courtesy of being tagged with acoustic transmitters.

They’re not getting the full benefit, of course, because—having fins instead of fingers—they can’t post suggestive comments or LOLCats pictures. And so far they’ve not been reported in any Twitter flame wars. But then the communication is meant to warn swimmers of their presence in the local waters, not enhance their social lives.

Halfway across the world, a hermit crab at the Seattle Aquarium called Marshawn Pinch is tweeting his little exoskeleton out. Pinch has a whole history and his own “Pinch” cam. He’s an interactive sort—you can tweet him questions and he responds.

Pinch apparently follows football and is a Seahawks fan. Go figure.

He doesn’t quite have the wit of Bronx Zoo’s Cobra, but we’ll see how he develops.

Time for a cuppa?

As I’m waiting for a recruiter to call me back, and drinking a pot of Trader Joe decaffeinated green tea, it seems appropriate to comment on a link passed on to me a while ago by one of my quasi-regular correspondents.

In this piece, the author excoriates anyone so uncouth as to add milk to Earl Grey tea. Well, I respect the diversity of reasons to get your knickers in a twist, but I have to say that I so loathe that particular type of tea that just the mention of “earl” in conjunction with “grey” starts my gag reflex process.

I don’t know why that should be—perhaps the corollary to “I like what I like” is “I puke what I don’t”.

But it is kind of interesting how many lines in the sand people are willing to draw over which types of beverage are acceptable and how you must prepare them—or else be thought a barbarian/ignoramus/rube/whatever. Martinis and tea seem to bring this out in in them.

(When he arrived at Princeton, the physicist Richard Feynman was asked whether he took his tea with milk or lemon; he famously replied that he’d have both. Thus was born the title of his first book of memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! But you can get away with that sort of thing if you’re a genius. Also if you don’t give a hoot about anyone else’s ideas on beverage consumption.)

Even George Orwell got into the act. Me—I don’t much care how you make it or drink it, as long as you don’t make me consume it your way. (I have a theory on that warming-the-pot thing, though: if the British actually used, you know, central heating, their teapots might not be so cold that they suck the warmth out of boiling water, so that when it pours out of the kettle it’s instantly rendered tepid. Just a thought.)

I do agree with the author’s opinion on the Brits making coffee. Those people rely entirely too heavily on instant, and it’s always a crapshoot as to whether you’re going to get decent stuff outside of an actual, you know, coffeeshop. Even restaurants don’t seem to have their hearts in it. Although they may just be trying to encourage table turnover. Could be.

I’m not what you’d call an expert on the black brew. I learned to drink it on the side of Fort Lee, Va., closest to Hopewell, “The Chemical Capital of the South”. It was made in urns by NCOs who didn’t consider it “coffee” until you could stand a spoon in it without leaning it against the side of the cup. (And the cups were all Styrofoam. Ah, happy times.)

In fairness, you needed to get it to that state before you drowned out the taste of the Hopewell water that was used to make it. At that time, I drank it black, but added sugar to it. Sometime in the intervening years I stopped doing even that—but of course I have raised the quality standards of what I ingest.

Like my coffee-mentors, I used to drink rather a lot of it, by which I mean that I’d typically get into the office around 0700 and drink an entire pot before anyone else showed up. Until one day I needed to have fasting blood work done—you know, you can’t have eaten or drunk anything except water since the previous midnight. And the earliest appointment I could get was for 1100.

By about 0900, I thought my skull would implode. And by the time the phlebotomist stuck me, I was hoping it would. She drew the blood and then brought me a cup of coffee from a pot that had been sitting cold for some time. I’m here to tell you that it plumb scared me that as I took the first swallow I could feel the iron bands relaxing around my head.

I decided I didn’t need to be that dependent on any substance that didn’t require corkscrews and I’ve been a decaf drinker pretty much ever since.

Naturally, here in the Valley they call Silicon (as was the case in the Emerald City) you’re viewed with suspicion if you order decaf. But I reckon that any group of people so freaking dependent on Starbucks really has lost its street cred when it comes to looking down their noses at what I choose to drink.

Like Feynman, I really don’t much give a toss what they think. Back in Virginia, I was once making a pot of decaf in the marketing department kitchen when the VP of marketing (to whom I referred as the Mughul Emperor, on account of his management style and charm) started giving me stick about it.

I looked him in the eye and said, “[Mughul Emperor], I’m the way I am and I don’t do caffeine. You do the math.”

He shut up and backed away.

More sense from a pissed parrot

Look, I was not exaggerating when I said in my Gratitude Monday post that Reginald Hill had a gift for language as great as his talent for storytelling, which the BBC TV series didn't quite get across. Here are just a few examples of same:

In Exit Lines, Detective Superintendant Dalziel infiltrates a country estate on a shooting weekend. (If you’re unfamiliar with the British concept of “shooting” I commend to you the 1985 film The Shooting Party, or the shooting sequence in 2001’s Gosford Park.) The notion alone sends regular readers into fits of giggles; but Fat Andy takes us even further when he informs his sidekick of his planned activities.

Pascoe blurts out, ““’You mean shooting…things?’

“’Aye,’ said Dalziel gravely. ‘They tell me things are in season.’

“’Birds? You’re going to go shooting birds!’ exclaimed Pascoe, incredulity struggling with indignation.

“’I asked about sheep,’ said Dalziel regretfully. ‘I wondered if they’d let me start with sheep, being only a trainee, so to speak. Something a bit bulky and sort of static. Sheep-shooting’s never caught on, they tell me. Stags, yes. But not sheep. You can do all kinds of things with sheep, especially if you’ve been stuck out on the moors a long time, but you can’t shoot them. It has to be birds. I asked about swans then…’”

Also from Exit Lines:

“The Deputy Chief Constable was not a man he liked. It was Dalziel’s not inaudibly expressed view that he couldn’t solve a kiddies’ crossword puzzle and had only been promoted out of Traffic because he couldn’t master the difference between left and right. More heinously, he rarely dispensed drink and when he did it tended to be dry sherry in glasses so narrow that it was like reading a thermometer looking for the bloody stuff, which in any case Dalziel regarded as Spanish goat-piss.”

But some of my favorite vignettes come from Pictures of Perfection. For example, when one of the villagers assures Pascoe that her son (who’s been seen riding about the place with a shotgun across his bicycle handlebars) would never have killed a kingfisher:

“She spoke with absolute conviction, but Pascoe was unimpressed. In his experience ninety-nine out of a hundred mothers confronted by a video of their offspring robbing a bank or ramraiding a warehouse or even just jumping a red light would say, ‘No, not my Tom or Dick or Clint. He’d never do a thing like that.’ He was looking forward to meeting the hundredth who’d say, ‘Yes, that’s the little toe-rag. Why don’t you bang him up forever?’”

Or this description of a garden shed:

“It was basically a store shed containing most gardening implements both ancient and modern, ranging from graip and dibber to chainsaw and strimmer. There was a musty, peaty, earthy smell distantly and not too pungently underpinned by something vaguely stercoraceous. A double row of shelves bowed under the weight of various tins and bottles containing stuff to kill and stuff to quicken.”

(And yes—I keep a dictionary to hand when reading Hill. A graip is a three-tined garden or manure fork; a dibber is a pointed stick for making holes in the ground for planting seeds; something stercoraceous resembles dung.)

Regarding one of the key characters, Girly Guillemard—well, I could go on at length, but all you really need to know is this:

“She was clearly on the edge of her nerves, yet Wield sensed it was more than a mere organizational crisis which had brought her here. He got the impression she could have supervised the building of a pyramid without breaking sweat.”

And I’ll leave you with this depiction of Wield’s dilemma at one point in the novel:

“He tried to soothe his dyspeptic conscience with the Fat Man’s frequent assertion that, the way the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] threw out perfectly good cases that had cost overworked detectives many sleepless hours, it made more sense morally, socially, and legally to leave justice in the hands of a rational, informed intelligence such as his own.

“Dalziel’s precise words were, ‘Them wankers couldn’t spot a bishop in a brothel. You get more sense from a pissed parrot.’”

I’ve been trying to find a way to work that sentence into a conversation, somehow. But probably not a job interview.

Not quite pictures of perfection

I wrote yesterday about Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels, which just knock me out with their brilliance. I’ve also been watching the BBC series based on them—not for inspiration so much as just a different way of looking at police procedurals.

Generally speaking, Aunty Beeb does a good job with this sort of thing, and I’m giving this one mixed reviews. They stopped using Hill’s novels as the basis for the shows mid-way through the third season (although they do resurrect one of them in Season 7—one with that toe-rag Franny Roote, ugh), and the stories kind of go all over the place after that. That’s disappointing, but—I suppose—not entirely surprising. It’s a high standard to try to maintain year after year, when you could be doing “Son of Big Brother Does Dagenham” or some such.

A lot depends on the actors filling the main roles, of course. Again, the BBC got some of it right.

Warren Clarke is perfect as Dalziel (although I’ve read that Hill didn’t think he was fat enough; I wonder who would have qualified?). I have seen him in other things, and I’m always blown away by his ability to subsume himself in the part. (He was right creepy in The Jewel in the Crown.) He certainly does a great job at the physical vulgarity described in the books, and he absolutely embodies Hill’s description of Dalziel’s “cetacean maw”.

Clarke has more hair than the Dalziel of the books, but I’ve noticed that film/TV producers are reluctant to portray balding men of pretty much any age in leading roles. (I’m thinking Ciarán Hinds as Caesar in Rome; he was not nearly as follicly-challenged as the real Caesar. But I won’t complain.)

Colin Buchanan plays Pascoe like he’s had a poker surgically implanted up his butt. Or maybe like he’s just taken a bite of sea-urchin-and-Brussels-sprouts casserole and is looking for a potted palm where he can unobtrusively spit it out. He comes off as a prissy, priggish prat. Other than that, though, he’s fine.

(In fairness, I’ve never seen Buchanan in anything else, so maybe he has a greater acting range than A to A-minus. But I’ve gone through six seasons of the series now, and he’s shown no signs of modifying that constant expression of pained sensibility. Or aftermath of sea urchins and Brussels sprouts.)

David Royle is way too good-looking to play Sergeant Wield. From the descriptions in the books, Wieldy has the sort of face that would not just stop a clock, it would stop Switzerland. I’d expected someone with the coruscating ugliness of a Jack Elam or a Warren Oates. Royle was kind of stunning in his non-ugliness, and it took a while for me to recalibrate.

Plus, in the novels Wield is absolutely impenetrable to everyone except Dalziel and, at the end of the series, to some extent to Pascoe. Royle does impassive quite well, but he has Frances McDormand’s ability to move an eyelid a couple of millimeters and shift the entire emotional content of the scene. So, he’s impassive though not impenetrable. But then I suppose that being completely impenetrable would defeat the purpose of, you know, acting.

Royle actually had the best line of the series. In Exit Lines, Wield and Pascoe are faced with the possibility that Dalziel may have committed vehicular homicide (or whatever it’s called in the UK) while drunk as a skunk. Here’s how they deal with the prospect:

Pascoe: “Let’s solve this case before he [Dalziel] sobers up.”

Wield: “That should give us a few weeks.”

Royle tossed it off with just the tiniest bit of resignation; it was delicious.

I understand that Wield doesn’t continue through the series. I hope they give him a Viking funeral, or have him win the lottery. Wieldy should not go gentle into that good night.

Susannah Corbett—the exophthalmic actor who portrays Ellie—certainly gets the eye-rolling stridency down. But once the producers stopped using the novels as the basis of the teleplays they wrote her and annoyingly fey daughter Rosie out of the storyline. I’ve not seen enough of the series to know what they’re doing with that, although I imagine it allows Pascoe to act on the lustful thoughts he has in the books. The producers are no doubt male.

Actually, I’m waiting for Season 7 to come to me via the Santa Clara County Library. That’s the latest season available at any of the six library systems to which I have access. That leaves Seasons 8-12 hanging in the wind. Frankly, I’m not wild about the quality of the post-Hill plots, so I don’t know whether it’s worth it to fork out for some streaming service where I could get them. (Alas, not even Amazon Prime has D&P on their “for-special-friends-of-Rick’s” watch-for-free list.)

Well, I won’t mourn the series the way I do Hill’s books. But I don’t begrudge it not living up to his standards. Not possible, sunshine.

Gratitude Monday: Wielding the language

Last Monday I focused on being grateful for a film, because it was intrinsically good, and I happened to watch it at a point when I really needed something to lift my spirits.

Today I’m grateful for a particular writer, whose books unfailingly engage my mind, expand my vocabulary, introduce me to vivid characters and entertain me to the last word of the last page. Of every book.

As you probably know, I read a lot; on average in the range of 110-150 books per year. Most of that is non-fiction; when I do step over to the dark side, it’s almost invariably detective fiction, and just about all of that encompasses police procedurals. There are loads of crappy purveyors of that genre out there, a fair number of adequate writers, a very few good ones and one consummate master.

Reginald Hill. And specifically his series on Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe, set somewhere in mid-Yorkshire (England).

I’ve been a fan of Dalziel and Pascoe since…well, I probably discovered them in the 80s. But I revisited them last year in the process of seeking inspiration on how to set up detective plots. Reginald Hill almost made me give it up.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, he writes the bloody hell out of a story. He wields language like a samurai does a katana. His characters are indelible—beginning with Dalziel: fat, vulgar, loud, and capable of holding more booze than anyone since Falstaff. Especially if someone else is paying for it. And yet—unlike Falstaff—nothing much slips past him. It’s gobsmacking to watch him in operation; he crosses over to cringeworthy on many occasions, but he is magnificent in his oblivion. Or (as it turns out) in his unapologetic dedication to doing whatever it takes to solve the case.

Pascoe, his series partner, starts out a Detective Sergeant in A Clubbable Woman, and progresses until he’s a DCI in the latest books. He’s a university graduate, in sociology, of all things; although thankfully he doesn’t seem to apply its precepts a whole lot. Perhaps because Dalziel generally makes preemptive strikes with his old-school-copper politically incorrect observations, which generally turn out to be spot-on.

Pascoe is a bit like Pauline (as in The Perils of)—he’s always getting shot, being buried alive in a mine collapse, finding unknown relatives, suffering through his daughter’s bout of meningitis or having her taken hostage by thugs. Well, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

Pascoe’s wife, Ellie, is a counterpoint to the cops—starting out as a university lecturer and then chucking it all to write a novel. She seems to take on more of the function of criticizing Dalziel’s political incorrectitude, leaving her husband a little freer to get his job as a policeman done. I expect Hill meant her to grate, because she does—a feminist who doesn’t seem to much like any woman with both a career and gumption, particularly DC Shirley Novello. Not even after Novello actually takes a bullet in defense of Ellie and others in Arms and the Women. (Hill may have got tired of her, too, as she barely makes an appearance in the most recent two books.)

Most interesting to me is Edgar Wield, who starts and ends the series as a Detective Sergeant. His dilemma as a corruscatingly ugly, gay cop (and you wonder at someone so physically and emotionally earthbound being associated with the word “gay” in its, uh, lighter sense) becomes one of the story arcs in Child’s Play, which—like Exit Lines—weaves threads of different colors and textures into a vivid and oddly harmonious tapestry of human frailties: fear, love, fury, foolishness, hope. You know—all the usual.

As a homosexual in one of the most virulently homophobic environments possible (especially in the 1970s, when Hill started writing the novels), Wield has to compartmentalize his life absolutely, and even after he comes out he makes the decision not to seek promotion beyond Detective Sergeant. He also takes pre-emptive measures to set expectations when he comes across new graduates who might have ideas that tutus and nipple rings loom large in his private life.

(As it happens, they don’t. His passions are H. Rider Haggard, Gilbert and Sullivan, and his classic Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle.)

Hill sets up characters and pulls them through subsequent novels, like DC Novello and DC “Hat” Bowler. (I won’t give away his actual Christian name, because it’s only mentioned once in all the novels, and you should find it out for yourself), DC Dennis Seymour and DC Hector.

Hector is a tad on the one-dimensional side, one of Hill’s weakest presentations. And I could have done without a recurring character like the sociopath Franny Roote, who’s so annoying that readers must have been lining up to slit his throat, starting with the voice box.

Yeah, I’d read Hill for the characters alone, but he weaves plot and subplot like a Bach fugue. Everything—everything—fits together. You skip over one bit of (seemingly) idle description, and it’ll come back to bite you in the butt at the end. If someone picks a daffodil or shoves a recording of medieval plainsong onto a shelf, sure as the earth revolves around the sun, that flower or music will be key to the ultimate resolution. As much as I want to rush headlong into finding out what-the-hell-happened, I’ve learned that I have to take my time and pay attention to everything along the way. It’s a good life-lesson, actually.

In addition, Hill’s not afraid to violate the canons of detective writing, and he doesn’t do anything according to a template. Some novels develop over a period of weeks; one plays out in just a single day. Not everything is solved; not every book involves a murder; not every puzzle is put together correctly. Shite, as Dalziel would say, happens; but in Hill’s cosmography, it happens so stunningly vividly that you just stand in awe.

Well, at least—I do. And I’m not that easily awed.

Hill’s first career was as a university lecturer, and all manner of literature informs his books. I enjoyed the conceit of Ellie’s reworking of the Aeneid in Arms and the Women—casting Odysseus as a fat, farting Yorkshireman and Aeneas as a slender, somewhat effete intellectual; possibly with a sociology degree.

Good Morning, Midnight turns on the poems of Emily Dickinson and features one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever seen; and I’ve seen a lot. Exit Lines is the interwoven stories of three old men who die unnatural deaths in a single night, alongside that of Pascoe’s father-in-law, who is withdrawing from life via dementia. In On Beulah Height, worked around Mahler’s “Songs of Dead Children”, a little girl lost dredges up the nightmare of 15 years earlier, when three more had gone missing-presumed-dead.

Child’s Play encompasses interlaced stories about sons and parents; about families; about love. It’s in this one that Wield comes out, although it turns out that Dalziel knew all along and didn’t care. With Dalziel, it’s who you are and how you do your job that matters, not whom you sleep with. He does, after all, put up with Ellie’s unending claptrap.

And Pictures of Perfection is a fabulous (as in “fable-like”) tale, set in a village that reminds me a bit of Santa Cruz: if you weren’t slightly loopy when you (or your ancestors) came to Enscombe, you either left or took on the characteristics of dottiness.

The Wield Contradiction comes to the fore in Pictures, one of the ones with minimal violence. The exchanges between Wield and the caustic-tongued bookseller Edwin Digweed are handled with a delicacy that would not be out of place in the pages of Jane Austen (whose letters form the framework of the novel). Absolutely beautiful—one of the most romantic encounters I’ve ever seen in any kind of literature.

And if you don’t believe me about how ugly Wieldy is meant to be (or how exquisitely Hill uses the English language), try this from Pictures:

“Wield barked the sound which friends recognized as his way of expressing amusement—though others often took it as a sign that the interrupted lycanthropic process suggested by his face was about to be resumed.”

Well, you see what I mean?

When I discovered last year that Hill had died two years ago yesterday, age 75, my first—entirely selfish, I admit—reaction was, “Oh, I hope to God he stockpiled a bunch of D&P manuscripts with his publisher. At least two or three. Well, even a couple of outlines that some other really spectacular writer could run with.”

But, you know—I can’t think of any writer out there who could match Hill for dexterity of wit and elegance in telling a story.

I was absolutely gutted to think there’d be no more—the last outing was Midnight Fugue, in 2009. If I’d known that when I started out last year to re-read them, I’d have paced myself instead of gorging on his banquets of characters, plots, full range of humor and bloody great use of language.

But in the meantime, I’m so grateful that Reginald Hill took up a life of crime, and that I was able to join him, Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield on those wonderful sorties into the human condition.