Final thoughts on The Devil You Know

Well, it wasn't too intellectual but it was kinda fun plus it did have to Google stuff so I give it props for contributing to my data stream.

I really wanted more demonic shenanigans but it was mostly about Felix being hired to exorcise a ghost from the National Archive of Britain. Kind of a fascinating place to set something, enjoyed that bit. Some parts of the story I really liked were his relationships with Cheryl (the Archive computer expert he hooks up with. Alas, their liaison is brief as he ruins her Mom's wedding reception by conjuring the ghost at the Archive in an attempt to find her killer), his roommate and college friend Pen and his other college buddy Rafi who is possessed by the demon Asmodeus. The succubus Ajulutsikael is interesting too although, alas, doesn't seem to have the Google-worthy pedigree Asmodeus does (hey, it was worth a try.) Also, enjoying the way she gruesomely smote the bad guys after Felix cut the silver binding chain.

Urg the damn dog just chewed up the back cover of my brand new Dean Ornish book. What possessed me to think I wanted an animal in the house?


Reminiscent of Butcher's Harry Dresden novels but maybe slightly better. The use of a tin whistle as an exorcism modus vivendi was...I dunno. Unique.  A little hard to get into. Better than holy water and the Latin Mass at any rate. I'd read another one. Another book that doesn't really need first and last lines recorded.

First thoughts on A Corpse in the Koryo

So, I finished The Devil You Know but with the holiday, I haven't been able to post yet. If I'm not too lazy after I work out, I'll do so tonight.

I'm now reading A Corpse in the Koryo which is James Church's first book about a policeman named Inspector O in Pygongyang, North Korea. After I started reading, it belatedly occurred to me that I might not enjoy reading something from a North Korean policeman's perspective (because working for that regime, the ratio of things done for the good of your fellow man has to be low to zilch.) It also was hard to fall into the rhythm of the book but I think it will make much more sense by the end. North Korea is such a wack country that I've had to approach it like I was reading a sci-fi space opera.

There is no corpse yet. The book starts out with Inspector O being asked to take a picture of a car on a road outside of Pyongyang in the early morning. He sees the car speeding thru the countryside sans license plates but can't take a picture because the camera battery is dead (a recurring theme of North Korea living in a strange limbo of a society with 20th century technology but lacking the resources to consistently power it.) This leads to some kind of vague trouble for Inspector O with Military Security and someone named Kang from the Investigations Department (this seems to have something to do with the Party.) The book is disorienting as you are joining a conspiracy already in progress. I suppose that is the intention.

I like the little touches like Inspector O complaining that the Police don't have their own thermos anymore so he can take tea with him on stakeout. They don't have a thermos? I wonder what Kang is up to and if he and Pak are both really dead (the story is alternated with an after the fact interview O has with MI6 somewhere in Eastern Europe. How the hell does he end up there? I guess I'll find out. And more to the point, since he doesn't seem to have a family, why does he even go back to Pyongyang?)

Several things I've had to look up:

• The Koryo is a hotel in Pyongyang. It is a luxury hotel, particularly by North Korean standards, but from what I've read you won't be confusing a stay there with the Ritz. Several reviewers on a travel site made a point of noting how weirdly thin and small the towels there are. Also, guests are not of course allowed to wander the grounds. It is a 45 story twin tower and probably is a striking landmark on the Soviet era-style crumbling Pyongyang skyline. Here are some more pictures of it, showing its best sides. BTW, I was curious about what they charge so I tried to investigate rates on Trip Advisor. For any style room and a variety of dates, they told me nothing is available. Perhaps due to recent Korean Peninsula hostilities there are no rooms at the inn for Americans. 
• Totally beside the point, but one reviewer made a point of saying they didn't recommend getting a massage in the hotel facility but they didn't elaborate. I'm really curious now. Why??
• There is also a Koryo Museum in Kaesong. Koryo refers to a dynasty that ruled Korea during the Middle Ages.
• Kaesong is right on the 38th parallel almost. You can't help feeling extra sorry for the people who live there. They just barely missed escaping the shit-tastic Kim regime.
• Inspector O meets Kang at the Juche Tower. Here are some more Google images of it. It's kind of pretty when it's lit up at night except for the tacky top. It is kind of ass ugly during the daytime. Kim Jong-Il is credited officially as its designer so perhaps that makes sense. 
• Juche refers to the ideology of Korea-centric isolationism that the DPRK ascribes to. It was originally put forth by Kim-Il Sung. 
• Inspector O mentions asking for a transfer to Kanggye and then fleeing there to escape whatever the hell is happening in Pyongyang. He also goes to Manpo later. They are both located in the mountainous Chagang Province on the border with China.  There is little information about it online however you can find a Wiki map of the military base there. 
• As an aside, this area was considered part of the legendary MIG alley
• The border with China is partially demarcated here by the Yalu River. Yalu is a Chinese word meaning "the boundary between two countries." Here is a great picture of the broken bridge across the river, taken on the Chinese side.
• Oh, this is interesting. The Chinese offered to rebuild the bridge if Pyongyang would open their economy instead of being freaks. Not much luck on that, yet. Interesting the Chinese are leading the way in diplomacy with North Korea though, favoring economic aid over sanctions.

North Korea is of course famous among other things for a famine in the 90's where possibly millions died. The tacky monuments everywhere.....I wonder if anyone there is bothered by it. Every show I've seen on North Korea reflects back a brainwashed, robotic populace who was taught that the Great Leader made the sun rise every morning. Curiously, it still rises without fail although he died in 1994. Of course not everyone can be that content because people clearly try and do defect. There would probably be more except for the fact that the defector's families are thrown into concentration work camps. 

I also remember when I was in Syria and we visited the Quneitra Memorial in Damascus. Quneitra being a town in the Golan that was destroyed in the two wars with Israel (1967 and 1973.) It is now in a DMZ occupied by the UN. When we got to the Memorial, one of my classmates pointed out that a North Korean flag was flying there (double props to him for being able to identify that. I need to work on learning my world flags one day.) We asked our guide about it who was a friend of ours. I wish I could remember his name. He was carrying out his mandatory military service by working as a guard at the Memorial (pretty lucky draw for him.) He said that the North Korean people were so moved by the plight of Syria and the Golan they helped pay for the Memorial. It's a pretty elaborate setup with a diorama and a building that looked like it could have been a Smithsonian annex. Now, the North Korean government obviously doesn't give a shit about the Golan Heights and surely doesn't have money to spare. I wonder what the story is about that.  I have a certain affection for Syria having studied there and I really wish they wouldn't join hands with possibly the most vile regime on the planet (it's a tie between that and Iran-oh wait, they cozy up to Iran too.) Sigh, get it together Assad.

More research for The Devil You Know

About midway through the book, Felix goes to Bunhill Fields to clear his mind as he says it's a cemetery for dissenters that hasn't been used in a long time so it's free of ghosts. This is a real place. It was a burial place for anyone outside of the Church of England and includes some famous graves like William Blake, John Bunyan and George Fox-a  founder of the Quakers.

Speaking of Fox, here is a nice quote from him:

"The Papists they cry, Conform.
And the Turk, he cries, Conform.
And did not the heathen Emperors cry, Conform?
And the Presbyterian, he cried, Conform.
And the Independents...
So everyone that gets the uppermost, and gets the staff of authority, commands...
But no law of Jesus requires it, who said, 'Freely you have received, freely give.'"

The word "Bunhill" incidentally derives from "Bone Hill." And it hasn't been used as a cemetery since 1855. There is also a large Quaker cemetery nearby. 

He also mentions John Owen and Isaac Watts are buried there, like the reader should know who they are.   Anyways, looked them up. John Owen was a 17th century theologian. He wrote a lot. He doesn't seem very exciting from a historical perspective. His contemporaries probably had the same reaction.

Isaac Watts was just a kid when John Owen died. He was a prolific hymn writer and wrote some books on logic. 

Carey refers to them as "the reservoir dogs of 18th century theology" (although Owen was 17th century.) I love the Tarantino flick. I don't get the joke.  Damn British humor.

A few more great lines

The Guardian Science podcast had a story about the Ig Nobel prizes (yes, it was a few weeks ago. I'm always behind.) The biology winners were a team that studied fellatio in fruit bats. Which is kind of brilliant. The Guardian science writer said the story made for a "marmalade dropping moment" when reading. That has to set a new bar for Britishisms.

I also read on the FreeThinker blog this great quote from Mencken: “theologian is defined by H. L. Mencken as a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that is not there–and finding it."

Epistemophilia: take a ride on heavy metal

Nope not the movie (although I learned recently that squabbling over the music rights kept it out of the DVD market for 14 years.) I was listening to a Brain Stuff podcast on how smoking affects the fetus and they mentioned that smoke contained the heavy metals cadmium and arsenic and I thought--wait, arsenic isn't even a metal. It's a metalloid. And cadmium is kind of in the middle of the transition metals at #48. It's below tin at #50. How are these heavy? And it occurred to me that although I had heard the term many times, I didn't really know what the definition was. I had assumed it was anything of a certain atomic weight-like at the bottom right of the table. Wrong.

(and obviously bismuth is fairly heavy and isn't toxic...)

It turns out there isn't a very good or standard definition. In medical terms, a "heavy metal" is any poisonous metal regardless of its atomic weight. This means that beryllium at #4 is a heavy metal. And, yes, it means arsenic is included even though it's only kinda sorta a metal.

I was only vaguely aware of cadmium being poisonous. It's a common impurity in zinc ores. And excess cadmium can cause something called itai-itai disease (which means "ouch ouch" in Japanese) which causes your bones to soften and kidney failure. It was first discovered, appropriately, in Japan on the island of Honshu. The outbreak was caused by miners polluting local water supplies. This went on from around 1912 until 1946 when measures were started to eliminate the pollution (it also killed all the fish.) Cadmium was not seriously suspected as the cause of the disease until the mid 1950's. The victims eventually sued and won but it wasn't until the early 70's.

I also listened to a Do Nothing But Read about Gothic horror. Usually I like this podcast but I got agitated when one of the podcasters mentioned that Bram Stoker wasn't able to copyright Dracula so everyone stole the character without impunity. The story of the original Nosferatu movie is fairly well known though and contradicts that. Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. And eventually won. The prints were all to have been destroyed but some weren't luckily as it's very influential. It also introduced the idea of vampires being killed by sunlight (not Stoker) which writers have been using ever since. Up until Stephenie Meyer that is.

(Florence Stoker wasn't a bad lady. Dracula was just her only source of income.) 

Ok, did some more googling. The podcast got it sort of right. Stoker failed to follow proper copyright law and it was never copyrighted in the States. However, in the UK and other countries per the Berne Convention, it was considered to be copyrighted. Most countries, including the US, are signatories on the Berne Convention. The US did not join, however, until 1989.

The good news is that Universal negotiated with and paid Florence Stoker for the rights to Dracula when they made the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, even though they didn't have to.

So, I heard two podcasts that I feared contained bad data but they didn't. Sweet.

New words from The Devil You Know

So it's interesting how fast a thing can pass through the cultural grinder turning it into pollen that sticks and shows up everywhere until you are sick of it. So fast. Vampires-urg, no more (except for True Blood.) Zombies? Sick of em and I never thought I'd see that day. I'm even starting to run out of steam on The Walking Dead and it just started. I still want to read the graphic novels though.

Anyways, what supernatural junk food is left? Yup,  demons and the devil. Louis Cyphre. Captain Howdy. I started reading Mike Carey's The Devil You Know which is equally about ghosts and loup-garou. I'm not actually sure if Shaytan makes an appearance in this but that's ok.

I'm surprised by how many things I had to look up in the first two chapters. To whit:

• fly tipping: this is what they call illegal dumping in Britain. 
• paletot: obviously a man's overcoat from the context but I thought it was something special. Nope, just an overcoat. And the final "t" is silent just like you'd think
• tricoteuse: technically this is French for a female knitter but it generally refers to women like Madame Dufarge who knitted during guillotine time during the Revolution. I thought this was just something Dickens whipped up. Who knew? It was a whole social movement of women who started out marching because they were pissed over bread prices. The people loved them. Then, like everything else in the French Revolution, they got scary. Rejected by their own revolution. Like the Red Guards. 
• Asmodeus, who possesses one character, isn't just made up by Carey. He is mentioned in the Talmud and in the Catholics-only Book of Tobit and the Kabbalah. In the Pseudoapocrypha, there is a story that Solomon tricks a demon into building his Temple. That demon was Asmodeus. Jewish mysticism-you gotta love it. Christianity is so freaking boring.

I also like how he refers to himself being compelled to complete an errand like "Ulysses tied to the mast." I think I'd like to go back and read his Hellblazer comics.

First and last The Left Hand of Darkness

First:

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Last:

"I  should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy," said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem's son, said stammering, "Will you tell us how he died?-Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars-the other kinds of men, the other lives?"

Final thoughts on The Left Hand of Darkness

I've been on a bad streak with book club choices. Winesburg, Ohio was just ok, even though I had read it and really liked it as a teen. It felt like that, as a book a teen would find profound. I again feel I must be missing something as it influenced everyone including Faulkner and my beloved Steinbeck. Then came White Noise and the less said the better.

But, streak broken because by the end I really liked The Left Hand of Darkness, to the point that when the Envoy travels to Estre Hearth to meet Estravan's kinsmen, I was a blubbering mess. Also funny as a book that up until about halfway through I would have said was interesting intellectually but lacked an emotional connection, I was in fact very emotional invested by the end. The travel over the ice did it. Frozen landscape contrasts with strong emotions. If I could only string a sentence together in an artful way, this would come across so much better.

I really liked the little touches LeGuin threw in: the detail she knew about travelling on ice which I know a little of from reading so many books about Everest, her observation that the electric cars travelling over the mountains were silent (this book was written in 1969-I didn't know electric cars didn't make noise until post-Prius), her contrast of Karhide and Orgoreyn (are there some Soviet parallels in this novel? There must be), the state-sanctioned religion in Orgoreyn which is a watered down greatly manipulated version of the much older Handdara religion of Karhide (this reminds me of the Chinese government's official Christian church.) And so much thought LeGuin put into what a sexless society would look like. The Sarf agent attempts to get the upper hand on Estraven by taking drugs that bring on kemmer and trying to-what?-seduce him? (this is how you know a world-building novel has worked when you take up the language naturally.)

And all the details about Gethen having very few animals, no communal insects and no species suitable for domesticating as a pet. And the Investigators speculation about why the Hainish founders would have tinkered to create a unisex human species and what the evolutionary advantage was (no rape is pretty cool. ) Le Guin is able to take something like never having seen a woman and make you really think what WOULD that be like? And how would you explain it to a Gethenian? And to live among people who think you are a pervert because you are a man (or a woman) all the time? Genly Ai-or Genry to the Karhidians-spent so many years on Gethen that he found male and female voices either too deep or too shrill when he finally encounters them again and thought of them as "great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer." I accidentally discovered that was the ending before I had read it when I was looking at the Wiki article for the book and expected to find it off-putting but it was just right.

I ended up really liking how Estraven became a co-narrator of the story. I didn't immediately see that coming. And I liked that about midway through I had to flip back and re-read some passages to see them with new eyes. And like the narrator, I loved Estraven.

I liked the contrast between the hot-tempered, lively people of Karhide that live in a disorganized monarchy versus the orderly, incurious people of Orgoreyn (the Orgorata) who live in a highly structured and regimented bureaucracy.  Everyone needs papers to travel anywhere or get a job. They have no reaction when raiders from Karhide burn their homes or when they are arrested and shipped off to voluntary farms for re-education. And you can tell they are passionless because their cuisine sucks. 

I think I want to read more Le Guin. There's a lot to think about here. It'll take me a few days to parse it all out.

Epistemophilia: Hans van Meegeren, the fake Christ and art thieves suck

So, while I was in the library the other day, I picked up a book on display about art travel (called Art + Travel) through Europe that actually is really entertaining-and since it's a travel book it has plenty of maps. It provides a lot of information for a travel book and has reproductions on a great number of paintings by Caravaggio, Munch, Van Gogh, Vermeer and Goya. And where to see them.

I wanted to highlight the story of an art forger named Hans Van Meegeren (1889-1947.) He started out as a student of architecture then later tried to become a painter but the Dutch critics weren't very complimentary. He set out to prove the experts wrong and began a career as a forger of Dutch masterpieces, including Vermeer who was from his own home town of Delft. He fooled many art critics and even the Nazis. Goering has one of his fake Vermeers, "Christ and the Adultress" in his collection. And this is how Van Meegeren got in trouble. After the occupation, he was arrested for selling Dutch cultural treasures to the Nazis. To prove his innocence, he painted one of his fakes in court, demonstrating the techniques he used to imitate the Dutch masters and how he made the paint appear aged.

He was given a token sentence of one year for the forgery and became a folk hero among the Dutch for fooling art experts and, even better, the Nazis. Alas, he died of a heart attack before he could serve his sentence.

BTW, the article about Vermeer (my favorite since I love all things Dutch Realism) mentions not much is known about him or his life but he was an admirer of the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius and owned some of his paintings. I don't know him--apparently he was in turn a student of Rembrandt. There is some information about him here.

I'm not the only one who loves Dutch Realism. The most stolen artwork in history is Van Eyck's The Ghent Altarpiece. I remember my art history teacher in college telling us he painted everything to exacting detail using single-haired brushed to get some of the details. You can zoom in and see amazing detail on the crown and the jewels and garments. Seven times it's been stolen and I didn't know this-it weighs 2 TONS. A panel of it is still missing.

A Vermeer was also one of the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The total value of that theft was around $500 million. None of the items have been recovered and also include works by Rembrandt, Degas and Manet.  The going theory now is a faction of the IRA has them. Apparently,  a lot of art is stolen as bargaining items for international crime. WTF, is the IRA still around? People are pigs, as my Mother often says.

(here's something cool about that Museum: if your name is Isabella, you get in free.)

First and last for Exile

First line:

"Kick it and see," he said.
She felt the foot going into her side, a dull thud ripple through the crippling pain.

Last line:

Vik waited all night. He sat on a bar stool, watching the door for four hours, pretending to chat to Shan about Gram Parsons and Motherwell's lineup. Every time the doors opened he felt sick and nervous. He waited and waited until the bar staff were shouting time, but Maureen never came.

Final thoughts on Exile

So I finished Exile and can really get going on Left Hand of Darkness for book club now.

This definitely had the feel of  a transition book but I really loved it by the end. I even was a bit surprised by the ending. Ann Harris turns out to be alive and in hiding from Frank Toner. A nameless junkie is dead in her place. Kilty Goldfarb is Maureen's pal and I hope she turns up in the last book. Maureen is contemplating killing her Dad to spare her baby niece from being molested too, Mark Doyle is trying to talk her out of it. Leslie is beginning to realize her boyfriend is a douchebag. And Maureen's brush with the drug dealing network makes her look at her ex-dealing brother Liam a little differently now (that and him cheating on his girlfriend when they were in London.)  And a dealer named Neil Hutton got shot up the arse for stealing drugs from Frank Toner. I wonder how literal that is. And you just know, that's probably happened to someone somewhere.

And the Glasgow police have their hands on crazy Angus's threatening letters to Maureen which implicate her in his beating and imprisonment in the last book. I wonder how their seizure of them can be legal but I guess it is under Scottish law since Denise Mina used to lecture on criminology at University.

And oh, the end with poor Vikram. Kind of heart-breaking. I want to read the last book but I'm going to wait a bit and stretch it out.

Epistemophilia: useful idiots and a buggering Amis

I listened to Part II of a BBC documentary on useful idiots, which is what Lenin supposedly called people in the West who unquestioningly supported his regime and parroted his propaganda. Part II dealt with more recent examples of the phenomenon. People in the British and US governments upheld the Pinochet regime in Chile and apartheid in South Africa because they were supposed bastions of anti-communism. They also interviewed a journalist who had written about China under Mao. He said anyone who lived in Hong Kong during the early 1960's would have known how severe the famine caused by Mao was because bodies would regularly float downstream to Hong Kong. He said that he and select other journalists were invited to tour China during the Cultural Revolution and were taken to schools and shown smiling children in classrooms. The only problem was there WERE no children going to school during this period in China. He reminded himself then of the bodies in Hong Kong. He said Mao probably killed or directly caused the deaths of 40 million people. That defies imagination. Who could top that number? Stalin, maybe?

They also interviewed some journalists from Focus, an Iranian English language news agency. They had until recently been given free reign but during the elections last year, the government cracked down on what and how they could report. One reporter quit and then during the protests he called his old office and asked if they were covering the protests. For that, he was sentenced to 117 days in prison. Over 100 of those were spent in solitary. He was subjected to torture and was forced to apologize to the Supreme Leader. While he was there, he was interviewed by a reporter from Focus. The BBC reporter was clearly offended by the notion of a journalist interviewing another journalist in a prison where they were being tortured and not reporting it.

I wonder was there any real value we gained by supporting Chile and South Africa. The Soviets were a general threat to us (and the rest of the world) certainly-we're only now learning how close we came to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's easy to look back and blame but I wonder if there was any genuine good that came out of turning a blind eye to a bad thing or was this just more venal stupidity bereft of benefit like the McCarthy hearings? Then again, look at that story about Iran again. Democratic values are useless if they are only sustained by supporting bullshit like that. You end up like the deluded Richard Nixon, criticizing Carter's treatment of the Shah who had been a "real friend" to the US. A real friend to us he may have been but to his own people, not so much. And look how much both the US and Iran has suffered because of our support for him.

It's so hard to get to the real truth of world issues. Science is much easier. Sometimes. I guess the question of whether a Goldilocks planet was really found orbiting Gliese 581g continues and will for some time as more data is analyzed.

Speaking of Stalin, here's a happier story from the BBC about Russia's women fighter pilots during WWII. The Germans called them night witches and spread rumors that they had been injected with some drug that allowed them to see better at night. One German pilot who was shot down by one supposedly refused to fly again when he found out a woman had shot him down. 


On The Guardian Books, they discussed authors who make appearances in their own works. Examples were Milan Kundera, Will Self and Martin Amis. The last one was funny because Kingsley Amis said this was a way of "buggering the audience." I knew vaguely that Kingsley was critical of Martin's work but some didn't realize the extent of it till I googled. The quote is funny but really, poor Martin.

More great lines from Exile

So, this book is a bit drawn-out and meandering. I understand now why Joanne didn't like it as well as Garnethill. Happily, I have Resolution still to look forward to, but I'll put that off since after that I have no more Maureen O'Donnell novels to read.

I still enjoy Mira's writing greatly even if the story lags a bit:

Sarah had left a bundle of Jesus pamphlets on the table. Each had a catchy title on the cover and mesmerizingly bad drawings of Aryan Jesus telling some black people what to do, Jesus having a laugh with some sheep, baby Jesus chortling in a manger....They were halfway through breakfast when Sarah put her figertips on the bundle of Jesus pamphlets and pushed them across the table to Maureen. "Why not have a read while you're eating?" she said. 
Maureen smiled. "You're fucking joking, aren't you?" she said, and the atmosphere deteriorated from there.

Maureen inhaled and felt the nicotine trickle into her system, tickling her fingers, opening her hair follicles, placating the angry rims of her eyes, kicking her into the day. (This description almost makes me want to start smoking. Compulsive Nicorette chewers should probably find something else to read.) 

She could waste years at home trying to make sense of a random series of events. There was no meaning, no lessons to be learned no moral-none of it meant anything. She could spend her entire life trying to weave meaning into it, like compulsive gamblers and their secret schema. Nothing mattered, really, because an anonymous city is the moral equivalent of a darkened room. She understood why Ann had come here and stayed here and died here. It wouldn't be hard. All she had to do was let go of home. She would phone Leslie and Liam sometimes, say she was fine, fine, let the calls get farther apart, make a up a life for herself and they'd finally forget.

Britisms from Exile

There have been several words and miscellany I didn't recognize from Exile so I've looked them up.

Maureen mentions an Aga warming her London friend Sarah's kitchen. Aga is a Scandinavian made stove that is sold throughout Britain-but curiously not in Ireland outside of Northern Ireland. They have a cute, distinctive multi-paneled front to them.

Sarah brings Maureen a plate of kedgeree to eat. It's a dish of boiled rice, fish, parsley, eggs and curry. I do love curry but, frankly, this sounds kinda like ass.

The London Met police tell Leslie they have to take Jimmy to Carlisle to be interviewed since they aren't Scottish. So it makes sense that Carlisle would be close to the Scottish border and it is: about 10 miles. It's in the county of Cumbria. According to WikiAnswers, Carlisle is about 110 miles from Glasgow though. Quite a drive.

(Incidentally, Cumbria just came up on a PRI Geo Quiz. It's where Stan Laurel was born, in the town of Ulverston. He was born Stan Patterson but changed his name, supposedly because he was superstitious and didn't like the 13 letters. There was a recent row in England when a tourism agency in Durham mistakenly printed 50,000 brochures saying Stan was born there.  Ulverston is much farther South than Carlisle though so even if Jimmy weren't being escorted by police who think he's killed his wife, he wouldn't be inclined to swing by there and visit the Laurel and Hardy Museum. Anyways..)

Sarah makes a face when Maureen tells her she has business in Brixton. Brixton is a neighborhood in the South of London. Apparently it's somewhat hip and gentrified now but there are still dangerous areas (Wikipedia helpfully informs me that you should never buy marijuana or cocaine from the dealers at the tube station. You'll either be buying overpriced oregano or get arrested. Helpful safety tip!) It seems like it's a mix of upscale housing, renovated Victorian buildings, music clubs and high crime areas which you should studiously avoid after dark. It's sometimes called the drug (and oregano?) capital of London. It's also a multi-ethnic neighborhood where you can get cuisines ranging from Jamaican to Eritrean. Some asshat set off a nail bomb near the market there in 1999 to ignite a race war. Luckily, it looks like no one was killed and he's now serving a bundle of consecutive life sentences.

Brixton is also the home of The Electric Avenue (the one Eddy Grant sang about.)

Maureen's mother Winnie mentions her estranged perv father Michael is living in a council flat. I gather from the context this is government housing and it appears to be. Evidently, there is a housing shortage in Glasgow. A Glasgow website says if you are low on money, you can apply for Council or Housing Association accomodations but there is a wait and if you are lucky enough to attain this low cost and assured tenancy housing (meaning your landlord has to get a court order to remove you if you don't want to leave), you may not find yourself in the most "salubrious" of areas. I love the Brits and their positive, tasteful spin on the mother tongue. It's not a crime-ridden shithole, it's just not salubrious.

The quotable Salman Rushdie

I heard an interview with Salman Rushdie on the BBC. He's just written a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I didn't realize it because I've never followed his fiction career much but it was written during the height of the fatwa crisis. He said he was against thinking that was defined by anger. I always was hesitant about Rushdie because for starters, I usually hate magical realism (unless it's served up with sarcastic yet thoughtful wit a la The Monsters of Templeton) and also because his books always struck me as the sort that academics raved about and yet were totally unreadable. Deciding what to read is going to require some judicious investigation.

First thoughts on Exile

I absolutely love the Scottish writer Denise Mina and her lugubrious heroines (her less lugubrious heroine is Paddy Meehan and, unsurprisingly perhaps, I liked that book less. Some people though consider Meehan favorite of Mina's heroines.) I wish she would write more about Maureen O'Donnell but I guess she favors the trilogy approach so she is, alas, done. She is considered a writer of Tartan Noir. I decided to do some quick research on the term. It was coined by James Ellroy to describe Ian Rankin, whom he considered an exemplar of the genre. The roots of Tartan Noir go as far back as Robert Louis Stevenson but it was heavily influenced by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  Here are some other Tartan Noir writers, some of whom I'm not familiar with.

I thought Maureen would be happy since at the end of the first book, Garnethill, she vanquished the man who killed her boyfriend, raped mentally ill women and framed her brother Liam for the murder. But she's still depressed and on the outs with Leslie who has a new boyfriend who usurps all her time and likes it when she dresses like a tart (how could you Leslie?) She is tormented by the idea that her estranged father, who raped her as a child, is back in town and living somewhere not far from her. Her mother is still a sloppy drunk who refuses to believe any of it happened. And the police are still hassling her about the circumstances of Angus' capture (him being the rapist/murderer/therapist who Maureen beat the shit out of and framed.) I'll pick a tormented protagonist any day over a plucky heroine who finds love in the most unexpected places.

A woman from Leslie's shelter, Ann Harris, has disappeared and she asks Maureen to investigate. It's also clear Leslie isn't telling everything she knows. The woman has in fact been murdered, as you find out in the opening chapter. In London. And there is of course much more to the story and she's not the ordinary victim of domestic violence she makes herself out to be.

As usual, lots of great lines but here are a few, emphasis on the downbeat:

"Yeah, I'm a shit," she murmured, taking a deep draw on her cigarette, savoring the knowledge of an early death. "I'm a shit. I'm a shit." It was nine forty-five in the morning and she wanted to get drunk and stay drunk.

"Jimmy Harris couldn't hit a tambourine." Maureen took a deep drink of her whiskey and lime and felt the thin skin inside her top lip shrivel in the concentrated solution.

She looked at the address on the scrap of paper. Leslie has scribbled "thanks" as the bottom, as if Maureen were a vestigial friend doing her a favor, an unhappy reminder of the gray time before Cammy and the bracing breeze in her cleavage. 

(Inness being the slightly dense bullying police officer who keeps being sent to question Maureen about Angus and the letters he's been sending her from the mental hospital.)

Maureen didn't know what to say so she told the truth. "You're frightening me," she shouted. 

Inness stopped still. 'I didn't mean to," he said stupidly.

In a TV movie they would have hugged each other, he'd have come back in and they'd have had an honest discussion about their feelings, a sun-dappled moment of tenderness with a stranger, and they'd leave, elevated and touched at their common humanity. But this was Glasgow. "Fuck you," shouted Maureen, and slammed the door in his face.

Pauline was a June suicide...Two weeks after she was released [from psychiatric hospital], a walker had found her dead under a tree. Maureen couldn't stop thinking about her. Her thoughts kept short-circuiting straight from worry to the happy image of Pauline at peace on the grass in springtime, oblivious to the insects crawling over her legs.


She'd [Maureen] known a lot of people and didn't remember liking any of them. She looked down. It was just a short drop. But Jimmy had nothing, and she had 8000 pounds of Douglas' money left....The banks were still open: she could take it all out and drop it through his door. But she might not come back to this point, this part of the windowsill.....It was nice out here with the wind and the rain and Maureen closed her eyes.

BTW, Maureen mentions Liam throwing a Hogmanay party. It's easy to gather that this is New Year's but I wasn't familiar with the expression. Hogmanay is indeed the Scottish name for New Year's. The tradition may go all the way back to the Norse. There are parties and parades and certain traditions of certain foods and drink as gifts that are starting to fade away. The tradition of singing "Auld Lang Syne" originated with Hogmanay.

Epistemophilia: homoagnosia and Dorothea Hoffman

An post with an unintentional word theme.

Dennis pointed out I made a homophone error in a review. Or homonym? I never could keep those things straight. So, I googled it of course and, it wasn't totally easy to reach a conclusion. Some sites don't seem to know themselves. Particularly one home schooling site which makes me fear for the next generation. I went to WorldBook online to get the answer.

Homonyms are words that are spelled and pronounced the same but have different meanings. Like grizzly bear versus The Violent Bear it Away.

All homonyms are a form of homographs. To be a homograph, words are spelled the same but may not be pronounced the same. An example is bass the fish versus bass in your stereo system. Like the asshole neighbor who comes home after the bars close on Tuesday mornings blasting his stereo full throttle loves his bass while I in turn would like to hit him in the face with a rotting bass.

Homophones are words with the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings. As in what I inadvertently wrote: right versus write. Or their/there.

Finally, I listened to a Poetry Magazine podcast about the poet Dorothea Grossman. She is a lady in her 70's who records her poetry with an improv trombonist.  The poems made me smile plus they were able to convey a complete visual and tell a story in such a brevity of lines. I think I'm going to have to seek out her CD. Here are a few of her poems. The first two were on the podcast, read by Dorothea herself. I sometimes have difficulty listening to poems being read because I need to read the lines but these were short enough and her style of reading was so witty and engaging that it's worth seeking out audio of her readings. Not all poets liked to read their own work publicly (including one of my favorites, Elizabeth Bishop.)

I have to tell you

I have to tell you,

there are times when

the sun strikes me

like a gong,

and I remember everything,

even your ears

Noon Concert

These frail, white widows

who get their hair done weekly

in tight curls,

like little flowers,

bend their heads

until the applause

says it’s time

to be brave again.

Spring

The murderer,
on his way to work,
stops to admire the wisteria
framing his doorway,
and waves
to the bug-eyed azaleas.

(I don't know what this last one is called but it was the funniest of the lot. I found it here:)

Ernest Heminway and Soren Kierkegaard 
liked to write standing up at a podium.
I hear you ask, "Why?"
I do not know for sure
but it must have been uncomfortable
after, say, 15 minutes,
which might explain
the darkness of their work,
or even why
nobody cares about them
anymore.

 There is an interview and a sample of her poems here.

Final thoughts on God is Not Great

 I really got stuck in the mud with Hitchens. I think it would work better to read it in parts when the mood hits rather than straight on from cover to cover. I will say it really crystallized my feelings about religion. The damage to human society clearly outweighs its ephemeral benefits. We can create secular structures to feed the poor, etc. In fact, we have. What's much harder is mitigating the effects of their war on science, on free thought, on minorities, on homosexuals, the terror and murder committed in your wholly imagined deity's name. I already felt the Vatican was morally culpable for their stance on condoms in Africa but I didn't realize they also spoke out about Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was issued on his life. But wait-not in his favor. Against him for defaming a world religion.

It also seems clear to me that banning gay marriage on religious grounds is CLEARLY a violation of separation of church and state. 

I remember once asking a Deacon about how the Church's stance on contraceptives/AIDS was valid (it's a long story how this came about) and he said, well isn't it true those people are doing something they shouldn't do anyways? So, they shouldn't be fucking? Sorry to break it to you dude but this is a biological imperative for most humans and no amount of beads or magic water is going to change that. What if they are married? After all, the Church does tell married people in Africa that they can't use condoms even if a partner is infected with AIDS and spreads rumors they don't work. Which make them both immoral and stupid. God, fucktard. I wish I had said all of that to him (except maybe the fucktard part.)

I think that's another reason I had to quit reading. It made me too angry. I did highlight some passages I liked. Way too many to preserve here. I'm glad I bought the book at any rate.