Between the pages

I came across a meme a while ago that reminded me of how Archie Goodwin described Nero Wolfe’s reading habits:

"I divide the books Nero Wolfe reads into four grades: A, B, C, and D. If, when he comes down to the office from the plant rooms at six o'clock, he picks up his current book and opens to his place before he rings for beer, and if his place was marked with a thin strip of gold, five inches long and an inch wide, which was presented to him some years ago by a grateful client, the book is an A. If he picks up the book before he rings, but his place was marked with a piece of paper, it is a B. If he rings and then picks up the book, and he had dog-eared a page to mark his place, it is a C. If he waits until Fritz has brought the beer and he has poured to pick up the book, and his place was dog-eared, it's a D. I haven't kept score, but I would say that of the two hundred or so books he reads in a year not more than five or six get an A." (Plot It Yourself)

I don’t recall whether Wolfe has ever not read a category D book all the way to the end.

Gratitude Monday: reading through the weekend

On this Columbus Day, I’m grateful for two things:

It’s a holiday for my employer, so I get another day to sleep in past 0520.

And on Saturday morning I picked up the latest in Louise Penny’s detective series about Chief InspectorArmand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. So I had something to read last night and didn’t have to watch the debate.

Library science

Remember how the Santa Clara County Library District was revamping its computer systems? Well, so far I’m not impressed.

Back pre-new-and-improved I got two kinds of emails: a “materials ready for pick-up at library” notice and a “materials coming due at library” notice. They were clearly distinguished by the subject line.

Well, since the installation of the new system, here’s what the former looks like:

And here’s the latter:

I don’t know how they could have made them less informative. (Unless they want to go down the route of my healthcare provider, who send out “new important stuff from us” emails, which require you to log onto their website to see what they designate as important.)

I’m particularly annoyed by the lack of link to the library’s site so you can actually renew the checked-out item(s). That used to be there. Perhaps it’s cheaper to send out emails without links?

Because I’m thinking that saving money is high on their list. Witness the self-service checkout terminals at the Cupertino branch:

There used to be twice as many in that row. I’m wondering if they sold the missing ones on eBay?

Four cups and five Haggadot

In addition to Good Friday, today also brings us (at sundown) the beginning of Passover. If you’re in need of an extra Haggadah, it turns out that I have five of them:

They all have the Seder story in Hebrew, of course, but two of them are also in English, two in French (including one with commentary by Elie Wiesel) and one—Haggadah from the Four Corners of the Earth—has English, French, Spanish and Russian wrapped around the Hebrew on each page.

I find it interesting that German isn’t one of the languages of the four corners of the earth.

Also, one of the English ones has really beautiful illustrations, almost illuminations:

What these books remind me of (in addition to Seders I have been part of) is a long weekend in Paris and buying so many books that I had to take a taxi back to the Gare du Nord to get home. (Yes, I bought all of the Haggadot—including the English ones—in France. Along with a shedload of other books.) Because if I’d gone via the Métro, I’d have had to change lines and lug the damned things through long corridors and up and down steps.

I always forget about logistics when it comes to buying books, and looking at these beautiful things, I’m glad I didn’t when they crossed my path.

And if you need a Haggadah for the next few days, I've got some to spare.

Hangul & hokey

I just finished reading a couple of books on the English language: Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story, by Michael Rosen, and The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal.

And I know I don’t have to tell you why I’d be reading a couple of books on language, do I?

The latter picks out words that have appeared in our language over time and discusses various aspects of each one. It starts with “roe” in the 5^th Century, which is related to an archaeological find of the ankle bone of a roe deer with some runic letters carved into it. Transformed into Latin letters, they spelled RAIHAN, which linguists concluded was most likely to refer to the animal on whose bone the letters were etched.

The entry on “Doublespeak” (originating in George Orwell’s novel 1984) was interesting to me not so much because of its beginnings. It’s pretty much standard I should think and doesn’t require much of a discussion.

But it turns out that there’s an organization called the National Council of Teachers of English, which gives out an annual award for doublespeak. “Winners” include individuals, organizations and just general words. For example, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announcing his plan to close 54 elementary schools in the city on account of their “underutilization” or space. Or the term “aspirational goal”, the concatenation of two words that mean the same thing (aspirations/goals). But when you combine them you produce “a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire all that much’.”

Immediately following Doublespeak is “Doobry”, which is a variant of dewberry, meaning something-or-other. My preferred version of this term is “duflunkio”, which I picked up from one of my classmates in the seventh grade.

(If you’re interested, but not enough to actually check out the book, numbers 99 and 100 are “Unfriend” and “Twittersphere”. Duh.)

Rosen’s book takes a different approach, using the building block of words, the 26-letter alphabet, to examine a number of elements of our language. One in particular I enjoyed was the letter K, in which he discussed the alphabet that was created by (or under the auspices of) King Sejong in the 15^th Century for the Korean people. A couple of interesting things to me:

There are actually two (very similar) alphabets in use today—“Hangul” in South Korea, “Chosun” gul in North Korea. I’ve always thought of it as the Hangul alphabet, but then I learned it in Seoul, so…

But here’s why Sejong either invented the alphabet or caused it to be invented. The only alphabet in use came from China, but spoken Korean didn’t match up with Chinese letters. Sejong saw this as a barrier to illiterate people ever learning to write. “[E]ven if illiterate people want to communicate in writing, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have had 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that this will turn out to be convenient for daily use.”

In other words—everyone in the country basically had the right to communicate their concerns in writing, and it was his duty as the king to create the means for them to do this.

As I understand it, the Hangul alphabet (now comprising 24 vowels and consonants) is a highly efficient method of building words through syllables and sounds. It runs rings around English in this regard. (Think “thought”, “through” and “though”, just for starters.) What an amazing gift for a ruler to give his people.

On the whole, Rosen really entertains with his approach. But I had to take issue with one of his statements.

“In Britain people do the ‘hokey-cokey’ but in the US they do the ‘cokey-cokey.’”

I don’t know where he got that last part, but I have never heard of a “cokey-cokey”. Surely he meant “hokey-pokey”?

Matters of the heart

Today being Valentine’s Day, I know you’re awash with pressure to produce demonstrations of undying passion for your significant (or even your somewhat-interesting) other. Flowers (better have a damned good explanation for that bouquet not being a fistful of red roses, at five times the going rate for other times of the year), chocolates (possibly more leeway there) and/or jewelry.

You do know that every kiss begins with Kay, right?

Well, forget about all that. Because I have something so much better than industrially-extruded conspicuous consumption that has the same ephemeral effect on the economy that it does on your social life.

It’s a great story in the New York Times, about photographer Lauren Fleishman, who was inspired by love letters between her maternal grandparents to embark on a project to photograph couples who’ve been together for at least 50 years.

Her grandparents married in 1944, and were together for 59 years.

Fleishman spent six years discovering and photographing the couples; her resulting book The Lovers was published last month.

The Lovers presents the intimate ties, of course. But the couples talk also about the much more problematic issues of long relationships—getting through rough patches, and overcoming those times when s/he just pisses you off beyond belief, without storming out for good.

That’s one of the characteristics of love that lasts beyond passion. Anyone can be in love, especially when you’re in your 20s or 30s (ish). It’s like one extended adrenaline rush, so you just power through the little hitches because you’ve got the incentive of the next romp to entice you. Fleishman focuses her lens and her interviews on how these couples managed to transcend the rush and turn it into a bond that has lasted for decades.

 Eric Marcoux and Eugene Woodworth. Portland, Ore. 

Fred and Fran Futterman, Brooklyn

 Yevgeniy and Lyubov Kissin , Brooklyn

I love the comment by Karam Chand, married since 11 December 1925 to Kartari in an arranged marriage. “My trick is to make. Kartari laugh... Being funny is my way of being romantic. I have been told laughing makes you live longer—my wife is still alive, so it must have worked. I love her, and I want to spend another 80 years by her side.”

Well—if that ain’t romance then I’m Maria of Romania.

The Baroness of Holland Park

One of my early heroes of detective fiction has died. P.D. James was 94 and had amassed multiple honors for her highly successful novels, most featuring policeman-poet Adam Dalgliesh.

I didn’t find her stories entirely comfortable; they were heavily laced with psychopathology, and so many of the characters were so disagreeable that I really wanted to throttle most of them and toss them in roadside ditches. But I admired James’s ability to craft a story and provide a compelling atmosphere, whether it be in a hospital, a publishing house, a nuclear power plant or a monastery.

James did not start publishing until she was in her forties, after a career as a civil servant, and raising her family. I really like that notion, of the second act being writing.

I confess that I thought she jumped the shark a bit when she wrote Death Comes to Pemberley in 2011. It tosses characters from Pride and Prejudice into a murder mystery, which I didn’t find as carefully plotted or as cohesive as James’s other works. But I respect the hell out of her trying something so different at age 91.

Something to aspire to, perhaps.

Literary matters

There’s this thing going around Facebook—you’re supposed to list ten books that have “mattered” to you. No specification on how they matter, but of course the challenge is to pare the list down to just ten.

Well, here’s mine:

Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, John Ellis.

This was my introduction to the First World War. I don’t even know why I read it that summer, but it was my WTF moment, such a vivid description of the ghastly life in the trenches that it sparked my concentration in New Military History, with a particular focus on mass warfare of the first half of the 20^th Century. When people ask me for recommendations on what they should read to “learn” about that war, Eye Deep in Hell is it.

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi.

This is the book that goes with me if I’m ever sent into exile. It’s possibly the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Levi was a chemist in Turin; in 1943 his life was interrupted when the Germans occupied the part of Italy not held by the Allies, and he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was a slave laborer in I.G. Farben's Buna plant. He wrote many books, novels, essays, etc., but The Periodic Table is the one I keep returning to. It’s a series of autobiographical short stories, each one tagged to one of the chemical elements. The one I love the most is “Iron”; Levi’s friend Sandro is my ideal of how a good life is lived.

The Odyssey, Homer.

I read The Odyssey in high school, and we basically jumped joyfully into the whole sea-cruise-from-hell thing. It seemed so full of panache, and adventure, and had that happy ending where Odysseus shoots all those sons-of-bitches suitors. And his dog remembers him. After 20 years, which made the dog about 25 and remarkably long-lived. TO was my introduction-in-depth to Greek mythology, and archetypes and all that stuff; I enjoyed it. But by the time I got to college and read The Iliad, I was considerably less inclined to put up with chapter after freaking chapter of a monumental testosterone-powered whizzing contest, amongst both the mortals and the gods, especially when the butcher’s bill is so high. I could hardly wait to move on to Aeschylus, where Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon. Good riddance, I say.

The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer.

Long before there was the Internet to ‘splain the fine points of roasting lamb or making meringues, The Joy of Cooking was my go-to reference. In retrospect, I think I may not have actually made a whole lot of the recipes in the book, but I certainly consulted the daylights out of it when I was looking for technique. Eventually it was superseded to some extent by Julia Child. And then, of course, YouTube. But it goes with me everywhere, because—hey, it’s just the classic.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

TWITW is the prototypical buddy story; Rat and Mole are about as good a pair of friends as you’re ever going to find, inside and outside the pages of a book. Yes, they have to deal with that whackjob Toad, and with the Weasels—don’t we all? Rat and Mole make me think it would be a good thing to go messing around with boats, even though even the thought of being on the water renders me queasy. Every year at Christmas I reread “Dulce Domum”, because this is what the spirit of the season is.

Pictures of Perfection, Reginald Hill.

I’ve already told you how much I love Reg Hill’s police procedurals about Dalziel and Pascoe; this is my favorite. It’s so…daft, so delicate, so delicious. And watch out for the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten.

My BFF gave me this, and I read almost the entire book on my flights back to LA from Seoul. I loved the wit, earthiness and perseverance Rosten described in the Jewish peoples. The understanding it gave me proved foundational when I was studying 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Century European history, and it was also helpful in navigating the executive stratum in film and television production. I read, reread and consulted JOY until my copy literally fell apart. I sort of felt I should give it a Viking funeral, because it gave heroic service to my careers. However, I don't like the idea of burning books.

Lives of the Noble Romans, Plutarch.

This is a holdover from a college humanities class on Ancient Rome. The thing that impressed me about Plutarch was that he wrote about his subjects with a certain degree of honesty. The one I remember was Cato the Elder, whom Plutarch held up as an example of a man dedicated to the civitas; even though he was really tight with a denarius, and when his slaves became too old to work, he turned them out to fend for themselves. I carry it around in my car in case of breakdown, or for doctors’ waiting rooms where the only entertainment they have is a TV set to daytime talk shows or sporting events. Plutarch is way better than anything on TV.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

I laugh every time some ninja rockstar self-styled techno-business-innovator next-big-thing guru spouts some sound bite and attributes it to Sun Tzu. As opposed to them, I’ve actually read this book, and understand its implications for a lot of arenas. I’ve also read Clauswitz’s On War, which has applications to the business world as well, but for some reason the gururati haven’t latched onto that one yet. One of the big challenges for implementing some of the precepts in TAOW is that they’re predicated on understanding yourself, understanding your surroundings and understanding your enemy. Most people can’t manage that first step.

The Long Good-bye, Raymond Chandler.

It’s not the first Chandler I ever read, but it’s my favorite. (Okay, there’s a line from his short story “Red Wind” that pretty well blows away everything ever written about LA, but this is the best of his novels.) I bought my copy for 90p at a news stand in Gatwick Airport the night before returning to the US from my bicycle trip through France and Spain. I had no money and nothing to do until the Laker Air flight to LA the next day; TLGB got me through. Look, Chandler had me at the opening line: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

What's on your list?

Gratitude Monday: Friends with (book) benefits

As you might deduce from my earlier post about my relationship with books, I read a lot. Because I love learning and I love doing it through books. But there’s another aspect to being a bibliobroad for which I’m extremely grateful—and that’s being given books and recommendations for books from friends. And I have a lot of those.

In fact, in the past week I’ve gone through three such, and am currently working on a fourth. The ones I finished are god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens; The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued his Empire, by Jack Weatherford; and All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945, by Max Hastings.

I’m still chowing down, so to speak, on The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food, by John S. Allen.

Now, see—I probably would have got round to Hastings’s narrative history of World War II on my own, because of me being a military historian; and he’s written compellingly on a number of conflicts. (I particularly recommend his Warriors: Portraits from the Battle Field, which is a series of concise biographies of men and women who were at their finest when they were literally under the gun.) But I hadn’t, and I can’t tell you how much delight I took in unwrapping the Christmas paper a couple of years ago and finding it. My completely non-military friend Marcia just got it perfectly right.

In fairness, it’s taken me several months to get through it; I could only do about 20-30 pages per day, and it’s more than 700 pages long if you read the citations, which I do. But Hastings filters that war through quotes from a variety of sources, the bulk of them ordinary people—housewives, students, factory workers, soldiers. You can find the usual self-serving crap from the politicians, generals and tycoons elsewhere; this one has the view from the ground in so many ways.

I got the pointer to Hitchens from a Facebook friend—in the past month I also read his memoir, Hitch-22, and the book he wrote while dying of esophageal cancer, Mortality. I would never have been driven to him without the push, because I’d read him occasionally in Vanity Fair, and—like all VF contributors—he had an attitude out to here, which could be summed up in one sentence: “I am published in Vanity Fair. Look on my works, ye puny, and despair.” There’s no piece in that publication in which the writer does not form a major focus of the story. (Dominick Dunne was another example.) I find this irritating after about the third instance, and as far as Hitchens went, most of his stuff struck me as more political manifesto than anything you could call actual reporting.

The three Hitchens books exhibited this in the extreme. Well, okay—one was a memoir, so that should get a pass. (Although I found it very interesting that, while he goes into great detail about his political beliefs and friendships with various men—and atheism, of course—there is no mention of his first wife, only passing reference to his second, and you wouldn’t know he had three children if you didn’t look him up in external sources.)

Hitchens is a very stylish writer, no doubt about it; no one knows that better than he himself. I’d have liked to see some examples of that put to use in just reporting something—in fact, he had quite an extensive career as a journalist, and I wonder how good his reporting was, because everything I’ve read is pretty much diatribe in one form or another. (I’m not saying he was not a brave man; he put himself in harm’s way many times to cover stories in unpleasant places. He even went through a “controlled” form of waterboarding so he could write about the experience for VF. It was one of his more measured pieces.) He strikes me as showing a schoolboyish relish in taking cheap shots and name-calling; if you express views different from his, you’re a gargoyle, or a boobie. Sometimes you’re a short gargoyle.

I also found some of his historical facts, ah, inaccurate (in two of his books); and when I come across bad facts that I easily recognize I always wonder what else is wrong that I don’t know about. Plus, if you’re going to engage in acts of political snark using historical events in support, it would be more impressive if you got your facts right. Certainly there should have been an editor to point this stuff out, but perhaps if you’re a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, you don’t need no stinkin’ fact checkers?

Well, I suppose much can be forgiven because he really knows how to turn a phrase. Going from Hitch to Weatherford was like eating a plateful of brown rice and steamed vegetables the day after having your entire dinner comprising nothing-but-nachos accompanied by a grande bowl of guacamole washed down by several birdbath-sized margaritas on the rocks made with Reposado and a couple of shots of Grand Marnier floating on top. With that crust of salt around the rim, too, because with Hitchens there are no half measures.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens was a gift from another friend—and another bibliobroad. Over the years I’ve got the most interesting books from her, including a study of redheads, history of the Little Black Dress, and the one I’m currently working on, about humans’ biological and cultural approaches to food. Carol Ann doesn’t need an occasion to send a book—sometimes I just am surprised when something appears in the mail, because she came across something she thought I’d find interesting. Mongol Queens just appeared beside my door mid-way through last month. Yay!

I’d actually read Weatherford’s earlier work, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. It was quite interesting, although I’m generally not a fan of the notion that “Nation/Ethnic group X saved/made civilization” all on its own. Nonetheless, I’d really enjoyed it. I thought this one was interesting, too—evidently Genghis Khan’s gifts for ruling and bringing people together was passed on to his female offspring, not his male progeny. I thought he could have made his point with somewhat less verbiage, but I’m always open to new explorations and interpretations of the past. And I don’t know a whole lot about Asian history.

And now I’m finding out a whole lot more about the biology of eating. It’s another book that I probably wouldn’t have sought out for myself (although if I’d come across it in a library display, I probably would have checked it out), so another change in direction courtesy of a friend. A lot of tasting takes place in the brain, it seems. Like so many other things. I’ve just got to the chapter on memories of food and eating. Yum.

Well, I could go on, but you take my point. Today I’m grateful for friends who feed my learning habit with books—on all kinds of subjects.

Gratitude Monday: Reading rainbow

A while ago I had a conversation with someone who mentioned that he came from a background where books did not figure in any major way. We were on IM, which is probably a good thing because when I read that, my eyes bugged out, I gasped and blurted out loud, “No books? How the hell do you escape without books?”

By escape, of course, I’m referring to reality. I have no idea how I’d have got out of childhood and youth alive, much less in any kind of reasonable working order, if I’d not had books of all sorts to climb into and close behind me.

As I look back on it, one of the few things my parents did right by natural inclination was to create an environment where reading was encouraged. Their personal reading was limited (mysteries for Mom, sci fi and westerns for Dad), but they didn’t restrict what we chose. If they saw you with your nose in a book, they didn’t look any closer to see what it might be; that was ipso facto okay.

I know Mom used to read to my older sister, because I’ve heard the stories about how many copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit got worn out. And I recall flopping on her bed while she read The Poky Little Puppy and Little Bear to my younger sister. I have no memory of her reading to me, but she must have done.

Thing is, as soon as I got the literacy wherewithal I was just off to the races on my own. You know how they start you out pointing at each word and saying it aloud? About halfway through first grade I figured out that if you bagged the hand assist and just read the word in your head, you could move a lot faster. Once I mastered that I didn’t want any intermediary between me and the writer.

(Oh, but I was absolutely crushed by the Babar books. The first one was written in printed typeface, which I could read. But subsequent volumes were in cursive, and they don’t teach you to read that stuff until the third grade. I had to wait at least a year to read them! I was so pissed off by that; you’ve no idea.)

I basically read everything I could get my hands on. Fiction, non-fiction, Time magazine, Popular Mechanics, cereal boxes. The ‘Rents actually didn’t have a lot of books around the house, so the Pasadena Public Library was pretty much my crack dealer.

(And what they had was kind of strange. I recall some folio-sized rendition of “Tam o’ Shanter” with the creepiest illustrations ever. Scared the daylights out of me and I’ve never been much of a fan of Burns ever since. I have no idea what it was doing there because my parents certainly were not fans of poetry; someone must have given it to them, for some unfathomable reason.)

I used to ride my bike to the local branch and check out the maximum number of books allowed (six back then) and chow down on them like ruffled potato chips. It didn’t much matter what the book was about, as long as it took me somewhere I could invest my imagination in. In the intervals between trips to the library when I ran out of reading, I’d pull out a volume of the encyclopedia to tide me over. Because there’s always something interesting to find out there.

(Yes, I read encyclopedias. You got a problem with that?)

The libraries always had a summer reading program. The year between fifth and sixth grade my family was quarantined because my sister got scarlet fever. Since I’d already had it I went to stay with my great-grandmother, who lived about a mile away from another library. Every day I was with her I’d walk up to the Catalina branch, check out six books, walk back and read them late into the night (my great grandmother wasn’t as fussed about lights-out curfews as my mother). Next day, same thing again.

Wasn’t like I was reading Proust or Petrarch; but it made a difference to me. (In September, when a librarian came round to school to hand out the little summer reading club certificates, she pulled out the one from Allendale and then the one from Catalina for me. She gave me a dirty look, like I’d somehow been gaming the system, but I didn’t care.)

I spent hours and hours transporting myself into anywhere, anytime or anything that wasn’t Pasadena. The first one I recall was getting the hell out of Dodge on the Hispaniola with Jim Hawkins, Billy Bones and the whole Treasure Island posse. And by “on the Hispaniola” I mean I just edited Stevenson’s story as I went along to include me scurrying about with the salt air stinging my eyes and the worn planks of the decks warming my bare feet.

(Of course, this was before I discovered that I’m not what is known as a good sailor. I was queasy on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and I spend most of my time under sail hanging over the (aft) rail, losing all my recent meals. So the truth is those pirates would have heaved my puking ass over the side of the boat before I got to shiver me first timber.)

But that’s reality, and the whole point of reading is escape. In books I could go to sea without worrying about Scopolamine patches or sun block—or about whatever’s happening in my own house. I could go on archaeological digs in Central America (no concerns about snakes, mosquitos or tetanus; just uncover those Mayan artifacts); work on the space program (I’ll pick up that physics stuff later; right now we have a moonshot to launch); dance at the ball where Natasha charmed Andrei; await final orders on Bataan. Even the notion of living in Iowa or Minnesota was attractive.

Eventually high school brought some discipline to my reading; college continued that process. My vocabulary and frame of reference expanded. I sought out different, even opposing ideas; thought about how other people processed their reality; sometimes tested the theses to see how they’d work for me. I demanded rigor in thought and clarity in expression.

Thing is, I’d forgot all about what those books meant to me—the difference between raw, freezing bewilderment and something filtered through larger experience, which can therefore be dealt with. Really, the difference between crushing and bearable.

Kids have multiple escape routes these days—video games, 700 cable TV channels, Internet porn; and it’s good that they have choices. Mine were limited, and I’m pretty sure that if I’d not had the buffer of all those books, if I’d emerged at all I’d have been a sociopath. 

I still knock back more than 100 books a year on average; because any time I can learn something, understand something in a new way or see how something affects others, I'm a little bit more secure.

So today I’m grateful for the thousands and thousands of books that have come into my life. And that Mom and Dad encouraged me to get out of their hair and go read.

Drinks of detection

Last month I wrote about tea and coffee in a general way. I also introduced you to Reginald Hill, one of the finest writers of detective fiction ever. Now, while Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield almost never drink anything without some considerable alcoholic content, tea does loom large in several detective series of my memory.

Going back farthest, the year I graduated from college I was introduced to Arthur Upfield’s novels about a half-Aboriginal detective inspector named Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police. Bony applies his understanding of both the land and humans of all varieties in solving crimes from the 1930s to the 1950s.

I have no take whatsoever on the accuracy of these “skills”, but they’re excellent story devices, and Upfield used them the way Tony Hillerman did with his Navajo detectives, Jim Chee and (to a lesser degree) Joe Leaphorn. (Chee and Leaphorn are coffee drinkers, though.)

(Let me just point out that having two of the best writers of police procedurals so close together on the “H” library shelf has made my patronage quite efficient.)

Anyhow, my recollection is that when Bony needs to step back from a problem, he often brews up a cuppa using his billy can over a small fire. He never goes anywhere without his billy.

By way of indicating how this sort of device can affect the reader, my sister started reading the novels during one of her summer breaks, and she was quite taken by that whole tea thing. Story is that in the wee hours of the night one time, her husband came out and found her in the kitchen making tea to accompany whatever book it was she was immersed in at the moment.

“What are you doing?” he asked, never having seen her make actual, you know, tea before.

“I’m boiling my billy,” she replied.

He retreated back to bed.

In Alexander McColl Smith’s series about Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe (which begins with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency), things also move slowly, in the rhythm of nature. Bush tea becomes a mechanism for Precious to encourage an emotional client to divulge the nature of his/her problem, or to focus her own mind on a case.

Well, I actually think she must have it delivered to her office in industrial quantities, because she goes through a lot of it. Like Bony, Precious relies on her understanding of the largely rural country around her, and her insights into human emotions, to solve her clients’ problems.

I was introduced to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency at a dinner party a few years ago in Palm Springs. Several of the women were reading the series and they recommended it to me; one gave me about five of the books. They also discussed the whole bush tea thing.

Turns out that bush tea is Rooibos, “a broom-like member of the legume family of plants growing in South Africa’s fynbos”. The same woman who gave me the books said that she’d been so interested in it that she’d gone out and bought some. I asked her how she liked it, but she shook her head. Not much, apparently.

Still—when you’re reading something like that, you have to give it a try. I did, and I tend to agree with her—probably an acquired taste.

Finally, another sort of tea figures heavily in the series by Eliot Pattison about Shan Yao Yun, a Beijing police inspector who ran afoul of the Party and was sent to prison camps in Tibet. The books are very well written, to the point that they’re actually harrowing to read at times. (And you understand that, as a military historian, I come across some ghastly stuff; so when I say “harrowing”, I mean that I’ve had to put the book down and literally walk away from it for a while.)

During his imprisonment with “outlaw” lamas, over the course of the series, Shan comes to understand the land and people of Tibet, knowledge which he uses to unravel complex and delicate problems. (Anything that puts you in the way of the Chinese government is de facto complex—and life threatening.) The beverage of choice here, though, is something called po cha, butter tea. It’s made from tea leaves, yak butter and salt.

Whether this would be an acquired taste or not, I can’t say, as so far I’ve not found any butter tea to try here in the Valley they call Silicon. Lack of yaks might be part of the problem. I imagine yak butter would be extremely expensive.

But if I do come across it, I’ll let you know.

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.

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.

Not the Gospel truth, I hope

A friend gave me a book of devotional readings, and I’ve got one that I need some help with. It’s to do with the story of Martha and Mary, as told in Luke 10:38-42. If you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s the deal:

Jesus and his cohort come into a village where a woman named Martha invites him into the house she apparently shares with her sister Mary. Mary sits down with the men to listen (not to speak, of course), while Martha is in a whirlwind of hospitality-related bustling—hanging up their coats, stirring up the fire, getting a meal ready, maybe giving the downstairs loo a quick wipe, and other suchlike. But Mary just sticks with the guys.

Finally, Martha drops a word in the Lord’s shell-like generally encompassing, “Hey—I’m doing all the work, here, while my sister just sits there like a slug. Why don’t you tell her to get up and help?”

And Jesus replies (as per NKJV): “Martha, Martha—you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Well, I have to say that I’ve always been a little troubled by this.

Yes, fine—it’s swell that Mary’s apparently felt called to Jesus, and is soaking up what he’s got to say (even if she’s apparently not allowed to contribute). I get that.

But if both the women just pitched up in the living room and hung on every word, everyone would be sat there in a cold room, with rumbling tummies and mice scampering across their feet. Because you know it would never occur to one man among them to get up and throw a log on the fire, much less slice up some bread for the hummus.

No—it would take a miracle on the lines of the wine at Cana (and even then, there were servers involved) to make that sort of thing happen.

So I’m really puzzling about this. There’s no one likes a good intellectual discussion more than I, but to basically dis the person who’s making the necessities of life work seems not only counterproductive, but potentially life threatening.

If what he in fact was telling Martha (and us) was, “Hey, we need both the contemplative and the active principles in our life,” then I get that. But what he (reportedly) says isn’t “horses for courses, honey”, it’s, “Your sister chose better than you did, so put a sock in it.” And that gets right up my nose.

So what’s going on here? What am I missing? Because as it stands, I’m not finding it either enlightening or encouraging.