First and last for The Unlikely Disciple

First:

It's midnight, at Liberty University, and I'm kneeling on the floor of my dorm room, praying.

Last:

Thank you for the lessons you taught me, even when you didn't know you were teaching them at all.

More from The Unlikely Disciple

While Kevin Roose was at Liberty, several news-making things happened. The Rational Responders debate with a beloved faculty member named Caner (which many students thought he actually lost.) Roose snagged one of the last interviews ever with Jerry Falwell who died in May of that year, 2007. And, the Virginia Tech shootings happened.

I like how you feel like Roose felt when you read this book. You think sometimes, hey these people aren't SO bad. But then something happens: a homophobic remark, an angry sermon against global warming or some of their reactions to the VA Tech shooting and you are right back to thinking, nope, there is still (regrettably and seemingly, inevitably) some grade A assholery going on here and the fuckers are totally oblivious to it.

It starts when one of the campus pastors concocts a prayer that makes me wince: "Lord, we know that you use catastrophes like this to bring people to you. What happened at Virginia Tech today was awful, but I pray that you'll use this situation to make people see their need of a savior. I pray that you would send believers to Virginia Tech, to spread the gospel to people who are grieving right now."

"Let's keep things in perspective," says a skinny guy in the corner of the room. "This was only 33 people. Millions of murders happen in the US every year through legal abortions."
"Yes," says the pastor. "Can't forget that."

But I've also seen a process whereby some reasonable, humble believers are taught to put their religious goals above everything else. This is how you get gentle Christian kids condemning strangers to hell in Daytona Beach, and it's how you end up with a group of Libery students sitting around a prayer room talking about the ideological crops that can be reaped from a national tragedy. 

And then Roose quotes Hawthorne from The Blithesdale Romance (which is his only book that I kind of am interested in reading were I not still turned off by the death by tedium march through The Scarlet Letter in my teen English class years) with regard to the devolution of Utopian communities: 

The higher and purer the original object and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism. 

Some great lines from The Unlikely Disciple

I am so jealous of this kid. He just graduated from college and already has a book published. But it's not even those lofty and clearly untouchable goals I envy. He can put a sentence together. Lots of sentences into pages and paragraphs which is something, alas, I know I can't do.

Onwards...

[on the subject of a "mission trip" to Daytona on spring break]:
Why not go somewhere where Jesus would be an easier sell? Like Islamabad? Or a Christopher Hitchens dinner party?

[on theological discussions in his dorm and the subject of Quiverfull which is the concept of having babies until a woman's uterus is stretched to the size of a Volkswagon to please God, who apparently is unfamiliar with the writings of Thomas Malthus]:

"But what about money?" I ask. "What if you have more kids than you can afford."

"Then your priorities are wrong," says Brad.

"Yeah," says Jake. "Plus, God knows how much money I've got. If he knows that one more kid will bankrupt me, he'll close my wife's womb until my financial situation improves."

"Totally," says Brad. "God is the only contraception that works a hundred percent of the time."

Okay, okay. I take it back. Some of the people are having crazy discussions.



[on Falwell's attempts to modernize Liberty]:
Tacking on an engineering school isn't going to do anything except make Liberty the only school in America where the engineering majors and the football player have exactly the same amount of sex.

[the chapter "The Workers are Few" about evangelizing at Daytona Beach is solid comedy gold. Here, his classmate attempts to evangelize to a Rastafarian-ish man named Reece, the only person who would listen to her]:

"I'm gonna live forever," he says. "You ever watch the Matrix? When Neo went to the Oracle, and he's like,'Am I the one?' and she's like, 'No you're not, because you don't know.' It's like that. You gotta know, you know?"
"No, I don't know," Claire says.
Reece tells us he's sorry but he has to go meet some friends at a different part of the beach. As we continue down the boardwalk, Claire turns to me.
"I think that man was on drugs." 

Even before this trip, I hated confronting strangers. I had a summer job once at a Manhattan juice bar. Every day, my boss would stick me on a SoHo street corner handing out coupons for raspberry smoothies. It was miserable. I'd spend five hours a day waving coupons at passersby, and when they didn't completely ignore me, they'd look at me like I was trying to stab them with a dirty syringe. One middle-aged lady swung her purse at me.  

A few people get genuinely angry. One biker said, "If I wanted to hear I was going to hell, I'd call my ex-wife." Then there's the you-poor-things response, which thus far has come exclusively from old ladies...They listen patiently, like a grandmother hearing a Girl Scout splutter through her cookie pitch-then they turn Claire down as politely as possible. One woman, who looked like Mrs. Butterworth in a one-piece, asked us, "Now, who put you two up to this?" 

Back at the host church, Scott explains that beach witnessing is just half of our agenda. Tonight, we'll get another chance at the nightclubs. We spend half an hour in prayer before dinner. It is, I suspect, the saddest prayer circle ever convened.
"Lord, I pray for the medical student I met today," says Scott's wife Martina. "Being a hotshot doctor at a big hospital is not going to help her when she has to face you, Lord."
"I pray, Lord, for the old man who spit on me," says Charlotte.
Claire is the last to pray: "Lord, let them be nicer to us tonight."

Witnessing at Razzle's, where everyone we meet is drunk or well on the way, makes communication a little harder. Two conversations I had in the first ten minutes:

"Excuse me, miss. Do you ever think about spiritual things, like heaven and hell?"
"Wooooo!! I love to party!!!"


"Excuse me, sir....Who is the greatest person you know?"
"Hmmmm...gayest person I know...I've have to say Richard Simmons."

First thoughts on The Unlikely Disciple

I'm reading Kevin Roose's book about a semester he spent at Liberty University. I find the fundamentalist mindset fascinatingly frightening like some people feel about roller coasters or the Saw movies (I like coasters, not so much the torture porn.) I that like his sincere curiosity led him to take a quarter's leave from Brown and spend it at Liberty. Wisely, he chose to be as honest as possible-if vague-about his back story rather than crafting a completely false identity (which could easily make him look like an asshole) and he decided to get to the real truth of the story rather than just writing a 300 page screed mocking fundies, which frankly would get tiresome. He cites this quote from P.J. O'Rourke who likens mocking the quasi-sister wife crowd as, "hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope."

(I'm not much a fan of the old school Gonzo journalists and P.J. can be too Republican and assy for my taste but it's a good quote to bust out.)

What's interesting about Liberty thus far is that you may know the standard prohibitions- no drinking, strict curfew, no opposite sex visitors in your room, no baby making without a marriage license. But it gets more North Korean than that: your email and internet traffic are monitored, students are not allowed to participate in non-sanctioned demonstrations or protests on campus, if a girl has an abortion (not sure if at Liberty or ever) she'll have to pay a fine and face expulsion, and you can get fined for cursing like in fucking Demolition Man. Well, outside parts of the Rocky canon that at least is one of the superior Stallone flicks. And there are pictures of the Dear Leader Jerry Falwell everywhere: murals, a Falwell Museum, bobble heads, tshirts for sale saying "Jerry is my homeboy." (and not this Jerry.)

The easiest way to stand out as being a non-Christian is profanity. Kevin got visible gasps and the stink eye for accidently saying "Holy shit" once at the dinner table-rookie error. I guess I could tolerate this rule easier if the liberal use of "fag" and "queer" were not in turn acceptable as insults.  I know lots of guys talk this way and I know lots of guys that do talk this way and you know, whatever, but given Liberty's aggressive anti-homosexual agenda, it is sick-making. Persecution of your fellow man is jim dandy but don't talk about doody that way. Holy shit indeed.

I went to a pre-college program for students considering medical careers at the University of Louisville the summer before college and somehow ended up with the only fundamentalist Christian in the group. She was the homeschooled child of missionaries in Brazil-seriously. Needless to say, we tried but weren't destined to be besties and I think she harbored unchristian hatred toward me by the end. She threw a colossal fit when I used crude language one evening (I called her a cuntwagon as a term of endearment. No, just kidding. I used "Hell" as an invective.) She was amped about heading off to some bible college in Tennessee. One of my friends and I read her college catalog and were stunned at the rules: no hand holding, no short hair on women and no gossip are all I can recall. Despite having grown up in rural Kentucky and being forced to attend St. Farty's Elementary, I magically had never come across the Christian fundie culture.

(honestly, some of her dislike for me was my fault. One night I got high with one of the RA's and a campus security guard and we ate her box of Little Debbie Oatmeal pies. The kind with the cream filling? Fucking delicious.)

Kevin also has to attend a creation science class. Say, ever wonder how there was enough food on Noah's Ark? The dude who teaches his class-and who repeatedly has to remind them he's a "real" scientist, just like I'm a real runway model-knows how. Ready? Estivation. That's right. Apparently only mollusks, reptiles and amphibians were on the Ark. Oh, and the Malagasy fat-tailed dwarf lemur. Well, the makes the space issue substantially less thorny now. Maybe that story is true after all.

It's such an odd dichotomy. The author says this is the friendliest college campus he's ever been on. People go out of their way to introduce themselves and seem genuinely concerned for one another's well-being. They constantly ask strangely intrusive questions like are you saved and how often do you read your Bible (they call this "Devotions" evidently. You never know when this odd bit of trivia might come in useful.) But, they just want to make sure you are not hellbound. It's kind of sweet. In fact, if that was where it ended with people just caring about their fellow man, this brand of religion might not be a bad thing. But what would become of their feelings toward Kevin if he were gay (or he told them he had gay aunts-which, he does.) Or he supported one of his female classmates in getting an abortion. Or if he tried to tell them that only lemurs and salamanders were on Noah's Ark. Or myriad other transgressions. I'm glad it's a well-balanced book and some of his fellow students seem likable. But as the author says, the weird Orwellian atmosphere with its dark undercurrents of repression, intellectual antagonism and hate make it impossible to feel comfortable on campus for more than a few hours. Not to mention the pictures of Jerry fucking Falwell everywhere. I wonder if there are even more now that he's participating in the carbon recycling process at a deeper level now.

BTW,  Kevin Roose has a fine website where I took a sample Liberty quiz and apparently am "wiser than Solomon."

While reading Bookmarks

I found this line in a review of Olive Kitteridge written by Nicole Chvatal for the Oregonian (but NYT worthy easily):

Strout's style is a clean and polished as the inside of an oyster shell; flip that shell over though and it's rough and gritty.

Final thoughts on Havana Bay and first and last lines

Not much more to say but I loved this book. Oh-and it turns out Tobias Fünke wasn't a Never-Nude after all, he was an Abakuan.

First line:

A police boat directed a light toward tar-covered pilings and water, turning a black scene white.

Last line:

Snow outlined lampposts, gutters, sills; packed against truck tarps and wing mirrors and on the collars people clutched up to their eyes; down one flagstone wall of the river and up the other like sparks from a chute; turned the trees of the park into whitecaps; made each step a visible memory and then covered it over.

More research for Havana Bay

When Renko arrives in Havana, a body is fished out of the body that is presumed to be his frenemy Pribluda. He is found in an inner-tube. Apparently, there are locals called neumaticos who fish with a net drawn over an inner-tube. They sometimes get attacked by sharks. I tried Googling different variations but couldn't find anything about it. Maybe they don't do that anymore. If you just Google "neumatico", you get a bunch of pictures of tires. Aha-now I get it. Neumatico=pneumatic.

Where does that weird silent "p" come from anyways? Evidently it starts with the Greek root "pneuma" which means wind. This now rings a bell from my history of science class. I do wonder though how the Greeks would have pronounced it.

Oh well. Anyways, Santeria and Abakua are two African religions that are popular in Cuba. All I know about Santeria literally comes from a Martin Sheen horror flick from the 80's. The locals get annoyed when Renko mixes them up because Abakua comes from the Congo and Santeria from Nigeria. Santeria is loosely a mix of Lukumi, a West-African spiritual tradition and Catholicism that percolated into its present form in Cuba. If you have heard of Babalu Aye (and what a great name), that is a Santeria deity.

Ah, I see Chango is too. Chango being the name of the life-size creepy mannequin in Pribluda's (illegal) apartment on the Malecon that keeps freaking poor Renko out. Until someone steals him. It's not clear yet why Pribluda had him, however I see he is "dominant over male sexuality." Since he was stolen and turns up later in an odd place, I'm wondering if there is something valuable stashed in him. Other than mojo.

Abakua, on the other hand, I had never heard of. Not even in a Sublime song, as far as I know. Wikipedia says it is a secret fraternity. And, wait- it also originated in Nigeria, not the Congo. Good grief, they aren't even contiguous. They are some sort of mutual aid group and conduct ceremonies called plantes with the drumming and the dancing.

I guess it's hard to maintain the secret part in those secret fraterrnities in the digital age since I got ~28,000 Google hits for it.

More Havana Bay lines

I think this is my favorite Renko so far although Joanne said nothing could top Gorky Park. Alas, it's been too long since I read it to remember. I should re-read it sometime. This working for a living shit clearly negatively impacts my reading and information absorption rate. I should move to the hills above Monterey and sleep in barns. Eh, wrong century for that now perhaps.

More lines I liked:

The problem was that he seemed to be going in reverse, knowing less all the time rather than more. He didn't know how or where Pribluda died, let alone why. The circle of Pribluda's acquaintances constantly expanded...Arkady had never before encountered such a variety of pristinely unrelated people and events: men in inner tubes, Americans on the run, a madman from Oriente, a ballerina, now Chinese bones and Chihuahuas. The truth was, Arkady thought, that apart from grave-robbing there was no suggestion of any crime at all, except for the attacks on him, and that was an error in timing, all they'd had to do was wait.

[because he was going to kill himself in Havana-that Russian humor is as deadpan and downbeat as it gets.]

[the entire sequence of Ofelia and her mother collecting their rations is hilarious. Just an excerpt]

"Tomatoes next week," Ofelia said. "That's good news."

Her mother exploded with a laugh. "My God, I've raised an idiot. There will be no tomatoes, no evaporated milk, no flour and maybe no beans or rice. This is a trap for morons. Hija, I know you are a brilliant detective, but thank God you have me to shop for you."
A woman behind them hissed and warned, "I will report this counterrevolutionary propaganda."
"Piss off," Ofelia' mother said. "I fought at Playa Giron. Where were you? Probably waving your tits at American bombers. I assume you had tits."

[Ofelia describing a murder scene]
A body that had been cut up was like a flower in bloom, releasing a smell that lodged like beads of blood in the sinuses and a taste that coated the tongue.

[and later describing that scene to Renko and how she threw up. Renko's lines are obvious.]

"Then I thought the dead man looked like you."

"There's a compliment you don't get every day."

.....

"Dr. Blas has never been sick."
"I'm sure."
"Dr. Blas says we should welcome smell as information. A body's fruity bouquet might indicate amyl nitrate. The hint of garlic can be arsenic."
"He'd be a delightful man to have dinner with."



[Ofelia recalling her childhood in the cane fields of Hershey-yes, named after that Hershey who set it up in 1917. The mill evidently was closed in 2002, along with half of Cuba's sugar mills.]
Suddenly she was back in Hershey, in the cattle fields where the egrets came from their roosts along the river. The birds were as white as shavings of soap, and as they crossed the carbon-black smoke that lifted from the chimneys of the sugar mill her anxiety was for the egrets' purity. 

[a Russian Embassy staffer-they are "between" Ambassadors-talking to Renko]

"This is a ghost ship. Never mind that we drove ourselves into bankruptcy to pay for this floating circus, that our entire system came crumbling down while they danced the salsa. The point is, relations between us and the Cubans have never been worse and now you tell me that you can't identify Pribluda's body?"


Did people die of love? Arkady knew a man on a factory ship in the Bering Sea, a killer, who had fallen in love with a woman, a whore, who died at sea. He erased himself from the face of the earth by stripping off his clothes and plunging through the ice. The shock of the water on bare skin must have been incredible, but the man was immensely strong and kept swimming away, away, away from the light. For murderers, senators, whores and good wives, love proved to be not the lamp at the ship's bow but the ship itself, and when the light was gone a person had no place to go but down. 

[and this-THIS-is how you write a sex scene]

Outside, he heard the ocean say, This is the wave that will sweep away the sand, topple the buildings and flood the streets. This is the wave. This is the wave.

Havana Bay so far

I love Arkady Renko best when he's a sad sack. I think Martin Cruz Smith does too. Thus, his long-pined for Irena managed to marry Renko and then die some unspecified time later in a Russian hospital clusterfuck all in the interval between books 3 and 4.

There is a pretty good map in the book (hooray for books with maps.) Havana is on the western end of the eponymous bay and Casablanca (where the Che Guevera Museum and giant Jesus statue are) is on the east. Jinetera literally means "jockey" but, in Cuba at least, has come to mean a prostitute. As always, Smith is somehow able to capture the mindset of citizens of various rotting Socialist nations, I guess because he's made it his prime subject for the last 20+ years.

Apparently, the USSR kept the Cuban economy afloat for many years and at least some Russians blame them for the collapse (and here I thought that was the one good thing Reagan did.) The Cubans refer to the time after the end of Soviet support as the "Special Period." All things Russian are anathema and speaking Russian is no longer a symbol of prestige. I wonder how difficult it is for Spanish speakers to learn Russian. They already have the "R" rolling. Also, Cuba has a very favorable doctor to patient ratio (never saw that Michael Moore flick or I'd know that already.) They also claim to have one of, it not the, highest rates of crime resolution but in a dictatorship it's hard to take that statistic to heart.

Poor Renko. Steals an embalming needle to kill himself and ends up using it to kill his translator who for some reason wants to kill him. My guess: his friend Pribluda was mixed up in a Cuban cigar forgery racket. Is forgery the right word for that? Eh, fuck it.

Anyways, here are some great lines thus far. As you see, a depressed Renko is a funny Renko:

"There will be an investigation," Arcos promised, "But of what is the question. Everything you do is suspicious: your attitude to Cuban authority, reluctance to identify the body of a Russian colleague, now this attack on Rufo Pinero." 

"My attack on Rufo?"

"Rufo's the one who is dead," Arcos insisted.

"The captain thinks I came from Moscow to attack Rufo" Renko asked Ofelia. "First Pribluda and now me. Murder and assult. If you don't investigate that, what exactly do you people investigate?"

Her mother maintained an expression of innocence until Ofelia hung up.

"What was it?"

"It's about the Russian," Ofelia said. "He killed someone." 

"Ah, you were meant for each other."

[Renko, traveling in the car with Ofelia, sees a graffiti that says "Venceremos!" and tries to figure it out]

"'Venceremos!'" means 'We will win!' In spite of America and Russia, we will win!" said Ofelia.

"In spite of history, geography, the law of gravity?"

"In spite of everything!" You don't have signs like that in Moscow anymore, do you?"

"We have signs. Now they say Nike and Absolut." 

He got a glance from Osorio no worse than the flame of a blowtorch. When they reached the embassy apartment, the detective told him that a driver would gather him in two hours for the airport. "And you will have your friend['s remains] to travel with." 

"Let's hope it really is the colonel."

Osorio was stung worse than he'd intended. "A live Russian, a dead Russian, it's hard to tell the difference."

"You're right."

[from a conversation between Renko and the Cuban ballet dancer Isabel, who is desperate to escape from Cuba where her father is considered a traitor and dance in Moscow]

"If I were hard on myself, I'd cut my throat," she said.

"Don't do that."

"Why not?"

"I've noticed that few people are good at cutting their own throat."

"Interesting. A Cuban man would have said, 'Oh, but it's such a pretty throat.' Everything with them leads to sex, even suicide. That's why I like Russians, because with them suicide is suicide."

"Our talent."

...Wonderful, the two most depressed people in the house had connected like magnets.

[a conversation between Erasmo and Renko]

..."Russians know nothing about women," said Erasmo.

"You think so?"

"Describe a woman to me."

"Intelligent, humorous, artistic."

"Is this your grandmother?"
......
"When you called me on the street, you said 'Bolo.' What does that mean?"
"Bowling ball. That's what we call Russians. Bolos."
"For our.....?"
"Physical grace." Erasmo unveiled a vicious grin.

[on Renko finally guessing Pribluda's Windows password--the name of his pet turtle Gordo]

Twenty-five years in the KGB and an agent used a turtle's name as his password. Lenin wept.

First and last lines Tortilla Flat

First:

"This is the story of Danny and of Danny's friends and of Danny's house. It is a story of how these three became one thing, so that in Tortilla Flat if you speak of Danny's house you do not mean a structure of wood flaked with old whitewash, overgrown with an ancient untrimmed rose of Castile....For Danny's house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it." 

(see? First lines are important. They are deliberate. Clearly we are meant to read this with an Arthurian lens. is the candlestick supposed to be the Grail, then?)

Last:

"The people of the flat melted into the darkness. Danny's friends still stood looking at the smoking ruin. They looked at one another strangely and then back to the burned house. And after a while they turned and walked slowly away, and no two walked together."

Final thoughts on Tortilla Flat

I finished this a few days ago and have since done much Googling. The story is supposed to be a retelling (or re-imagining is perhaps a better term) of the Arthurian legend with Danny as Arthur of course and the houses-and later house-as the Round Table. Steinbeck was really into King Arthur since he was a child and had a book published posthumously about it. The book never seems to be mentioned when Steinbeck's canon comes up so I wonder if it's no good or not what he intended (it kills me to see great authors like Hemingway's remaining papers continually trolled for works that were never intended to see the light of day. He's had-what-3 novels published since he died and all of them were shit.)

Speaking of which, I wonder what the upcoming David Foster Wallace novel will be like.

Anyways, Tortilla Flat. Very Steinbeckian in its prose and themes. The writing just resonates with Steinbeck's love of humanity. It feels very close to Cannery Row but that is just a much better book. This one felt a little slight although I did find some of the stories funny: Sweets Ramirez and her motorless vacuum cleaner, Pilon leaving Big Joe Portagee pantsless on the beach, Jesus Maria buying a bra for his would-be girlfriend the cannery slut. Some of the other stories I found very sweet: the Pirate going to Church to see his candlestick and retelling the story for his dogs (I'm a sucker for dog stories) and the ending with Danny was sad, although how else could it end. Some other stories just went on too long (and some of the wine drinking got old) and I just didn't get into the Madonna-esque story of Teresina Cortez and her bajillion children. Interesting story about the bean harvests though and her vieja cursing the Virgin for greedily taking her candles and not helping was funny.

The Shakespearean language is curious. This book made me rethink how important what we bring to books is. I assumed it was because Steinbeck has mentioned at the beginning that paisanos spoke with an accent whether they were speaking Spanish or English and the "Where goest thou?" dialogue was a literary trope to make that evident. But some reviewers think the intention was to convey a sense of noblesse oblige on the protagonists. Likewise, I supposed I would have killed the mood at the final party where Danny runs into the woods chasing the otherworldly scream he heard only to plummet to his demise by saying, "That was an echo." 

I'd recommend new Steinbeck readers start elsewhere. He is eternally superior to Hemingway in my mind although the great literary minds think elsewise. But great literary minds also think Don DeLillo is a good writer.

Clifton Fadiman famously said that The Moon is Down "seduces us to rest on the oars of our own moral superiority." Then again, he speaks highly of Steinbeck in his book, The New Lifetime Reading Plan. Apparently, F. Scott Fitzgerald hated him too but Harold Bloom says that was because Steinbeck's writing made Fitzgerald's topics seem frivolous. I thought Harold Bloom had sniped about Steinbeck winning the Nobel Prize but I can't find that quote at the moment. Others questioned why he won for a series of novels he wrote in the 1930's (the Prize was awarded in 1962.) The New York Times, via Arthur Mizener, at any rate took issue with it.

The movies that make you verklempt

So, I went to see True Grit this weekend with a friend of mine. Quite good and looks beautiful-several scenes could be stills you hang on your walls. The ending had that distinct Coen Brothers melancholy tapering off. And is evidently true to the Charles Portis book which I've been wanting to read.

The movie was therefore by my reckoning kind of sad but my friend had this intense reaction to it. He's kind of really in touch with his emotions in a way that makes me feel that I have a ball of Turtle Wax for a heart in comparison. We went to eat and he said he was choked up about the movie. And yes definitely. He started crying in the restaurant. My food came. I wondered if it was rude to eat. I decided it wasn't.

I didn't have that reaction to this particular film but there are certain films whose mere mention will start to choke me up. I tried to make a list. I feel it is incomplete so if I am so inclined and I don't find searching the blog for it maddening, I will add to it over time.

• What's Eating Gilbert Grape?: that one scene where Johnny Depp introduces his reclusive obese mother (Darlene Cates) to his girlfriend Juliette Lewis and she tells her by way of apologizing for her size, "I wasn't always like this" to which the girlfriend says, "Well, I wasn't always like this." I can't think of a more perfect response. 
• Au Revoir Les Enfants: ok I'm kind of cheating because how can Nazi shit not choke you up? But that final scene where the Priest is being led away from the school along with the Jewish students and teachers he harbored there AND the fact the story is at least partly autobiographical for director Louis Malle. Oh God. Pause for Kleenex. 
• Saving Private Ryan: Heroism, cowardice, sacrifice, Tom Hanks says "Earn this" and dies. 
• Gardens of Stone: the final scene where James Caan tells his girlfriend Angelica Houston he's asked to be deployed to Vietnam and she says, "I know."
• Farenheit 911: I don't care what anyone says about Michael Moore. It hits me in the gut to see that woman overcome with grief on the Washington Mall over the death of her son in the stupid fucking war.
• Philadelphia: A friend of a friend described the scene to me where Tom Hanks shows his Kaposi legions on his chest in court and how that scene made him break down in the theatre (he told me this story when we were at visiting hours at a funeral home which is kind of weird for several reasons including I don't even remember why I was there.) I thought the scene didn't sound that tear-jerking. Then I saw the movie at the dollar theatre. Yes, it is that tear-jerking. And then the freaking Neil Young song they play at the end.

A co-worker and I once decided that the Christmas Claymation special "Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey" sent our whole generation into therapy. If they were still airing it today, I'd probably still cry every year when Nestor's mother died. Although its Christian propaganda nature would probably just cause me to shun it entirely.  You know what Rankin Bass special they unjustly did stop airing is "The Year Without a Santa Claus." Brilliant. I see both it and Nestor are on YouTube. Goddamn it, stop looking at me with those big sad eyes Nestor. I am not watching you.

(Good grief, ABC Family thinks they have to edit Nestor to make it suitable for broadcast? Didn't I see a clip of their show about teen mothers on The Soup where a girl tells her mother that she had amazing sex and that's why her daddy died?)

First and last lines for Faceless Killers

First:

"He has forgotten something, he knows that for sure when he wakes up. Something he dreamt during the night."

Last:

"Before he went to sleep, he lay in bed for a while in the darkness....Again he thought about the violence. The new era, which demanded a different kind of policeman. We've living in the age of the noose, he thought. Fear will be on the rise. He forced himself to push these thoughts aside....The investigation was over. Now he could finally get some rest."

Final thoughts on Faceless Killers

So, I'm glad I finally got around to reading the godfather of Scandinavian mystery, Henning Mankell. I liked this and I have the feeling Kurt Wallander grows on you. I definitely want to read the next ten. Also, it appears he wrote one about Wallander's estranged daughter, Linda.

The story is about a particularly nasty murder of an elderly Swedish couple in Scania (Southern Sweden. County seat: Malmo, the third largest city.) The violence of the murder raises the question of the increase in violence in Swedish society. The crime scene is so bloody (the man's nose was cut off, his wife had a noose tied around her neck) that one of the first responders tells Wallander it looks like "an American movie." Ahh, it's great how the rest of the world views us.

I found several things interesting including that Swedish cops at that time (~1990) didn't regularly carry guns although Wallander feels they probably will have to soon. The Swedes are trying to cope with the growing refugees requesting asylum in their best socialist Democratic fashion but the government is inept, the refugees are largely unaccounted for and can easily disappear and the police and populace (particularly the racist elements) are fed up. There are retaliatory crimes against refugee camps: someone throws a sack of turnips (!) at an old man, hitting him in the head. The camp in Ystad is set on fire. Finally, a Somali man is randomly shot and killed as he walks in the woods near his camp. I thought the solving of that crime was a little anti-climactic although I liked the little details like Rydberg and Wallander theorizing there are two perps since the shooter was seen eating an apple but there are cigarette butts around where they think the getaway car was parked. Since someone who gets stressed and eats apples probably also wouldn't be smoking. I think Mankell is more interested in telling a story and getting his points across than in creating suspense. It felt a little like the first episode of Prime Suspect. Oh, it's.....the guy they suspected all along.

The murder of the elderly couple turns out to have been some shifty Czech immigrants (it was a foreigner after all just like the elderly woman said with her dying words to Rydberg) who hung around banks looking for someone making a large withdrawal. The farmer had an illegitimate adult son and was still paying for him. He also had money from some shady business he and his father ran to supply the Nazis during WWII. It involved horses. I don't want to think about it.

Poor Rydberg, who was the only detective that had many distinguishing features besides Wallander, looks to have terminal cancer and won't be back. I wonder if Swedish cops these days are always armed?

What show exactly did Andy Kaufman get kicked off of?

I was listening to an old Lyrics Undercover podcast today about REM's "Man in the Moon", which btw might be one of my favorite songs ever. They mentioned Andy Kaufman being voted off of Saturday Night Live. This always confused me because I've heard at different times he was kicked off of either Fridays or SNL. I also have a dim memory of watching Gary Kroeger tell people to call in and vote and I only remember him being on SNL. I also remember this was back in high school or junior high and my friend Carla was sleeping over and she wanted to call in but we couldn't agree because she wanted to vote for him to be on SNL again while I thought his stupid Latka routine killed Taxi and I said vote him off. Shit, I didn't know he was going to die of a rare lung cancer shortly afterwards. Also, we ended up trying to pull the phone out of each others' hands and broke the jack so the question quickly became moot.

According to Wikipedia, it was indeed SNL. There was a blowup on Fridays about him breaking character in a sketch and getting into an on-air fight with a producer but that was staged. I remember that (although I didn't see the show-I never watched Fridays) but the voting incident occurred on SNL. I kind of remember now reading a history of SNL that mentioned it was a prank but a serious one. It hurt Andy's feelings when he was voted off but he abided by the vote although he did appear on tape one more time to thank the people who voted for him.

I'd really like to see his movie "My Breakfast with Blassie" (for some reason, my favorite part of the REM song is when Blassie is name-checked. I get a shiver.) It's one of those moments that make me wish I had Netflix. But, I am just not down with having to subscribe. I'm bummed out Blockbuster might not survive. Then again, they wouldn't have that flick anyways.

I also remember A&E had an old show that was taped at the Improv. Cindy Williams hosted it once which was kind of a surprise but she had a background in standup, particularly with Andy Kaufman. He used to do his routine in nightclubs and it was her job to stand up and mock him in a French accent. I found Kaufman annoying about half the time but that sounds hilarious.

Epistemophilia: no LaGrange for Hubble

I listened to an episode of Astronomy Cast that answered listener questions. Most were hard to follow such as the one about whether you can accelerate matter to a speed sufficient to cause a black hole. Sorry, too dumb to understand that bit of quantum weight gain. But there was one about Hubble that was interesting.

So, Hubble cannot be pointed at the Sun and its caretakers take pains not to do so, lest it be seriously damaged. If that is the case, why didn't they launch it into a LaGrange point? Specifically, L2 (or even more specifically, Sun-Earth L2, as opposed to the Earth-Moon L2.) L2 being the point on a line drawn between two large masses where the point lies beyond the smaller of the two. In other words, so that the Earth would be shielding Hubble from the Sun. In fact, that's where Planck (observing Cosmic Microwave Background) and the European Space Agency's Herschel (looking for water and like molecules) are now. And that's were the James Webb telescope will be headed.

The reason Hubble is not in L2 is simple: the Space Shuttle. It was designed to be periodically serviced by it (it's the only space-based telescope so designed) and getting out to L2 is simply beyond the Shuttle's reach. Since Hubble was originally launched with optics that caused it to be near-sighted, it's also a good thing we could get to it. The Shuttle that carried out the initial corrective mission was Endeavour.

Here is a link to a great NASA article about LaGrange points. L1, L2 and L3 are unstable and I believe require periodic corrections to remain in the sweet spot. Aha, NASA says, "The L1 and L2 points are unstable on a time scale of approximately 23 days, which requires satellites parked at these positions to undergo regular course and attitude corrections."

What I've looked up thus far for Faceless Killers

So, I'm winding up my holiday mystery sojourn. Some of it was at least on the heavier side, like the current one I'm reading by Henning Mankell. The overarching theme of his series is what has caused the decay of Swedish society. At least they've been successful in keeping up appearances. I think of Scandinavia in general and Sweden specifically (along with Denmark) as being somewhat Utopian. Vast social welfare networks, high literacy and a nearly atheist society. However, there are also serious problems such as human trafficking, racism and Nazi movements and increased violence towards women. Although on the last one, some Swedes dispute the meaning of that statistic, saying women are simply more likely to report acts of rape, etc. in Sweden because they are encouraged to do so which means its a positive.

(then again, the Swedes' history of collaborating with the Nazis in WWII is kind of murky so is their society really degenerating or are they fighting their way up?)

Faceless Killers is the first book in the Wallander series. The farmer who opens the story by discovering his neighbors have been murdered makes several references to the county of Skåne (which seems to be pronouned "Skoanay" according to Wikipedia.) Skåne is known to English speakers by the exonym Scania which is preferable because I don't have to mess with the crazy Swedish diacritic. And speaking of Scandinavia, that's where the word comes from.

Scania is the Southernmost county in Sweden. Its seat is Malmo (where the Oresund Bridge now connects Sweden to Denmark although the ferry they mention in the book still exists.) It's small but contains ~13% of Sweden's total population-which makes sense when you look at a map.

Wallander is based in Ystad which is on the Southern coast. According to Wikipedia, it's small. Like 17,000 people. Curious to read a mystery set in a fairly obscure place. According to Forvo.com, it is pronounced "ee-stad" with a soft "d." If you Google Ystad, btw, you invariably get references to Wallander. A whole tourism industry is set around him. Also, Ystad is apparently very picturesque and one of the best preserved old towns in Sweden.

First and last Grave Secret

Not much to say about this book but I enjoyed it and I'm glad I picked this series back up. Mystery of Cameron's disappearance resolved : murdered by her stepbrother (and Tolliver's brother) Mark when she told him she had discovered their younger sister Gracie was not their sister. And that is because their shitty junkie father took the real Gracie to the hospital too late when she was sick and she died. Or he might of killed her but they really don't know. And he replaced her with another baby but that story is even more complicated. The baby had green eyes. Both of the parents had brown eyes. Throw in Gregor Mendel and Cameron's senior year biology project and bazinga. Harper and Tolliver get married and, yes, they are step-siblings. Fuck it. It's not that creepy except for Harper's tendency to still call Tolliver her brother sometimes (a really odd artistic choice on Harris' part but clearly intentional so whatevs. ) Some people bitch that some characters names and ages changed between the four books. I didn't read them back to back though and since they were minor characters, I doubt I would have noticed. Part of me feels like a slacker but part of me feels like, "There is someone out there more obsessive and lint picking than I. Hoorah."

First line:

"All right," said the straw haired woman in the denim jacket. "Do your thing."

Last line:

"And they're all out there waiting for me. All they want is to be found."

Epistemophilia: I saw infrared

Ok, that was dumb-but, it does make me think of one of the best celebrity interviews I ever read which was with Michael Biehn of Aliens and Terminator fame. He was so unusually honest he flat out rocked balls. He said his least favorite directors were Edward James Olmos (who was kind of a dick) and the guy who directed that Navy Seals movie he was in. Biehn said the guy was a dumbass because, among other reasons, he told Charlie and Michael that they were going to infiltrate a terrorist camp because they were able to see with their infrared goggles that they had missiles stored away. Michael had to explain that infrared didn't mean you could see random things through walls. How can you not love that guy? Outraged over the egregious state of science education in this country.

I see the director's name was Lewis Teague and his career highpoint appeared to be directing Jewel of the Nile and Cujo. He has since gone on to direct something called TBone N Weasel. (Holy shit, Gregory Hines was in it? Ok, time to step away from the IMDB.)

So, I listened to an Astronomy Cast the other day about infrared astronomy. Being able to use telescopes in the infrared was a huge boon to astronomy (it's how we found the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way among many other things.) Infrared is split into near, mid and far with near being closest to what we can see with our eyes and when we talk about terrestrial infrared detectors, we usually mean near infrared. Far infrared is cold stuff. Anything that emits heat (which is just about everything) emits some form of infrared.

The name, btw, comes from the Latin meaning "below." So Infrared is below red on the spectrum. Or you could say, between microwaves and visible light/red.

We experience far infrared as heat but not near infrared. Here is some info from NASA, which is geared toward kids thus I could understand it about the using false colors to read infrared images, among other things.

The boundaries between near, mid and far and not universally agreed upon, but the boundaries of infrared in general are. It's a much longer wavelength range than visible light.

They also mentioned that you can remove the infrared blocking filters from your fancy digital camera to use it as an infrared detector (or, presumably, see secret missile stashes.) This almost makes me want a digital camera.

Infrared telescopes that see in the far range have to be super cooled so they have to be in orbit. Like Spitzer and, in 2014(ish), the James Webb. Germanium is typically used as it is a semi-conductor that is transparent to infrared light.

Also, Theodore Gray has a website? Cool. I love his book.

Best and worst of 2010-a rambling pastiche

So, I actually thought to make a "2010" shelf on Goodreads this year thus I am able to correctly assess my reading. Wow, I read more mysteries than I thought. Here are some of the high and lowlights:

Worst read of the year: White Noise. Well, thanks to Don DeLillo, I don't have to pick a book that was just ok but dull and unfinishable (Judgement Calls) or amateurish and sloppy (Slipknot). I could pick one that was fuck you awful. Smarmy satire about academia that was a smarmily pretentious as the behavior it sought to mock. Hated. It.

Best discovery of the year: I have never been inclined to pick favorite authors because I gravitate more towards individual books. (Well, there was that time in 8th grade when I discovered romance novels and I told the local librarian that famed romance hack Janet Dailey was my favorite writer. I wish I could look her up and tell her I grew out of that.)

Anyways, John Steinbeck is officially my favorite writer after I devoured Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Moon is Down last year. I struggle to pick my favorite among them but I think it's Cannery Row. Still don't get the poison cream puff thing that Ed Ricketts' wife likened the book too. I read The Pearl back in 8th grade and didn't really like it. I read East of Eden in college and loved it although other than reading Of Mice and Men a year or two ago, I hadn't really picked him up since.

Best mystery: This is a tie between Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith and Garnethill by Denise Mina.

Best scifi: Again, I'm torn between The City and The City by China Mieville and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. I liked but didn't love Cat's Cradle.

Best short story collection: well, I didn't read that many but the winner is easily Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom which left me feeling everyone on the planet should read it.

Best memoir: Spider Eaters by Rae Yang. I would say it's the most visceral memoir of the Cultural Revolution but who am I kidding? It's the only memoir of the Cultural Revolution I've read. Still, it's rare because she admits to being in a group that beat a (possibly mentally ill) man to death after accusing him of attempted rape on flimsy evidence.

I am happy to have overcome my literary prejudice toward graphic novels. Not sure why this was. I didn't really like Watchmen that much (which makes me unique on this planet I realize) but that's not the reason. I certainly loved comics as a kid-mainly Archie and The Fantastic 4. Anyways, Ghost World cured me. In fact, I have Volume 1 of The Walking Dead waiting in the car right now.

My favorite TV show is impossible to pick but at the moment, I'm obsessed with Breaking Bad. I even have the elements picked out that would show up in the opening credits were I in the cast (vanadium and nickel...)

I don't really have a least favorite show as I just turn shit off if I don't like it but Gretchen winning Project Runway was probably the worst tv moment of the year for a show I used to love. Granny panties and pleather? Really?