The Pink Dog from Ipanema

So, February was the centennial of one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop. To celebrate, some of her unpublished works are seeing the light along with a travelogue she wrote on Brazil without the edits that she disliked in the original published work.

Speaking of Brazil, what I liked best though was a story on Here and Now about one of the poems she wrote during her time there, "Pink Dog." It was, sadly, the last poem she completed before her death in 1979, although she had started writing it in 1963. Apparently, you can recite it to the tune of "The Girl from Ipanema" for most of the lines. I can't seem to pull it off but the reader on the show did (quelle dommage, his rendition is not in the link.) Here is the poem, see if you can do it:

Pink Dog

[ Rio de Janeiro ]

The sun is blazing and the sky is blue.
Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.
Naked, you trot across the avenue.

Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!
Naked and pink, without a single hair . . .
Startled, the passersby draw back and stare.

Of course they’re mortally afraid of rabies.
You are not mad; you have a case of scabies
but look intelligent. Where are your babies?

(A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.)
In what slum have you hidden them, poor bitch,
while you go begging, living by your wits?

Didn’t you know? It’s been in all the papers,
to solve this problem, how they deal with beggars?
They take and throw them in the tidal rivers.

Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites
go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights
out in the suburbs, where there are no lights.

If they do this to anyone who begs,
drugged, drunk, or sober, with or without legs,
what would they do to sick, four- legged dogs?

In the cafés and on the sidewalk corners
the joke is going round that all the beggars
who can afford them now wear life preservers.

In your condition you would not be able
even to float, much less to dog- paddle.
Now look, the practical, the sensible

solution is to wear a fantasía.*
Tonight you simply can’t afford to be a-
n eyesore. But no one will ever see a

dog in máscara this time of year.
Ash Wednesday’ll come but Carnival is here.
What sambas can you dance? What will you wear?

They say that Carnival’s degenerating
—radios, Americans, or something,
have ruined it completely. They’re just talking.

Carnival is always wonderful!
A depilated dog would not look well.
Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!

 

First and last for Hide and Seek

First:

What a start to the working week.

Last:

He brought out a metal wastepaper bin from beneath the desk, dropped the photographs into it, and lit a match, holding it over the bin, as he had done so many times before.

Final thoughts on Hide and Seek

I just finished the second book in Rankin's Rebus series. I like it well enough. Better than Sue Grafton for example as he deals with real locations and issues. Specifically in this book, the rise of heroin use in Edinburgh and the influx of wealthy Londoners looking for cheaper digs (like Los Angelenos moving to Las Vegas and Phoenix here.) I was curious about a few things.

The author mentions Calton Hill as being an infamous gay cruising site. Apparently, this still is true (you really can find anything on Wikipedia. Traffic cone?) There is also a cemetery there where David Hume is buried.

This is two books in a row (the first being Trainspotting) that mentioned the heroin and AIDS problems in Edinburgh in the early 90's. According to this article, it's making a comeback. At least Edinburgh isn't the AIDS capital of Europe-that's Barcelona, at least as of 2003. Here's another story that takes it full circle, saying Trainspotting is to blame for their specious reputation (funny they mention Begbie though. He was one of the very few abstainers in the book.)

To get these images of the British Isles out of my head (skag use and gentlemen's clubs where junkies are abused for kicks), here's a list of some trivia about Edinburgh's famous Castle, taken from its website:

• The first building on the site was by David I and included a Chapel dedicated to his mother Margaret, in 1130. The St. Margaret Chapel is still standing
• The crown jewels of Scotland, The Honours, are on display there. They were created in the 16th century. They were first used in the coronation of Mary Queen of Scots. They were buried in 1650 to hide them from Oliver Cromwell (not to worry, there's a malaria carrying mosquito with his name on it) and later from the Nazis.
• The Royal Palace is where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James, later King of England.
• Mons Meg, one of the world's oldest cannons at 550 years, is on display there. Although between 1754-1829, the English had it on display at the Tower of London. Thank Sir Walter Scott for convincing the King to return it.

So this is what I get for not reading Astronomy in a few months

I missed the Supermoon on March 18. That is, the moment where the rise of the full moon coincides with its perigee. It appeared 14% larger and a whopping 30% brighter.

First and last lines for Trainspotting

First:

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. 

Last:

Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be. He'd stand or fall alone. This though terrified and excited him as he contemplated life in Amsterdam.

Final thoughts on Trainspotting

Ok, I'm glad I stuck this out. After the story about the baby dying and Sick Boy shooting dogs in the park to make them bite their owners, I really was ready to fuck off. Also, lots of stories about dirty knobs which isn't too surprising given this is a story about a bunch of skag addicts but, gross. Compelling reading at least. Also, I learned you can lose a limb if you inject into your artery instead of your vein. How the hell do you even do that? If you are really curious, here is more information.

Here were some of my favorites for various reasons:

• The Skag Boys, Jean Claude Van Damme and Mother Superior: Rents and Sick Boy go to score from the White Swan, a former mate and once promising soccer player that's been on junk so long his nickname is Mother Superior. While Sick Boy inevitably finds a girl willing to shag him, Rents is anxious to return home and finish his Van Damme film.
• The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival: The sequence I remember best from the movie (other than dead baby scene). Rents tries to kick and instead goes to see a dealer and scores some suppositories to ease his withdrawal. Alas, he soon has an attack of withdrawal-related diarrhea and shits them out into the world's most disgusting toilet and has to fish them out. And then he sticks them right back in the place where suppositories go. Who still wants to do heroin now, kids?
• Growing Up in Public: Nina (Renton's cousin) deals with her period and a death in the family. Who knew that electric blankets could make a corpse sweat?
• Cock Problems: just what it says. Rents decides he's run out of veins and has been using his junk for junk.
• Na Na and Other Nazis: oh, poor sensitive Spud. Here he narrates his family tree. Hilarious and riveting.
• The First Shag in Ages: Rents picks up a girl and FINALLY gets some action. Alas, she has a secret that leads to an awkward family breakfast.
• Strolling Through the Meadows: Spud again is horrified by the violence of the world he shares with Rents and Sick Boy
• House Arrest: Rents' parents force him to kick. In his withdrawal delirium, he is visited by the now clean Sick Boy and the ghost of Sick Boy's dead bairn.
• Bang to Rites: Rents is not really that sad at the wake of his brother who died in military service in Northern Ireland. This leads him to start a fight with a distant family member and shag his brother's widow in the restroom. 
• Bad Blood: the occasionally mentioned Tom (one of the very few non-junkie or criminal characters) makes an appearance in this story of how he takes revenge on the very bad man who, indirectly, gave him AIDS.
• There is a Light That Never Goes Out: a night on the town ends with a girl finally taking an interest in Spud
• Feeling Free: after all the misogynous claptrap, a great story of Allison and Kelly engaging in some female bonding
• The Elusive Mr. Hunt: why that famous scene from Porky's isn't always so funny. Is Mike Hunt in the parking lot?
• A Leg-Over Situation: The White Swan loses any hopes of a soccer career by turning to his arteries after his veins no longer suffice.  He then considers whether the abscess where his leg used to be would make a good injection site (er, no) and why Allison wouldn't blow him just because he has a filthy knob when she owes him after all. 
• Winter in West Granton: Rents is clean but his mate Tommy who first tried smack with him is not. And he has AIDS. People in the projects are not obliging of his illness. 
• Station to Station: a scam to sell a shitload of heroin in London gives Mark the opportunity to make a clean break at his buddies' expense.

A great line from Fitzgerald

We read This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald for book club this month. I don't even think I wrote about it on here. The book made almost no impression on me except I was annoyed. When your chosen metier is the tragic ennui of rich white people, your writing had better be pitch perfect or your readers are likely to react with, "Tell it to your polo pony, Captain Abercrombie."

So I went back and read "Winter Dreams" recently, his most famous short story which I had read in high school and remembered almost nothing about. It's available online here. Fitzgerald wrote it in 1922, which means about three years after Paradise was written and two years after it was published. He had already markedly improved. It was good to go back and read this. Paradise was so lackluster that it made me wonder if I overestimated Gatsby.

Fitzgerald, other than hewing close to the autobiographical well for materials, liked to write about the death of the spirit. I think that's nicely encapsulated here in the final line of Winter Dreams when Dexter learns 5 years later that Judy Jones is married to a man who drinks and treats her poorly and has lost the looks that made her so singular:

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."

A pre-Cambrian fossil story and what Daft Punk, Doctor Who, Droogs and Churchill have in common

PRI's The World in Words had a story about the vocoder. Doctor Who fans will know it as the voice of the Daleks. Daft Punk fans will know it from half of their albums. Clockwork Orange fans will know it from the horrorshow version of  Ludwig Van's "Ode to Joy" in the score. But after its invention at Bell Labs in 1936, it took a detour through the war effort. It was used to encode some phone conversations between Churchill and FDR. Apparently, Eisenhower did not like sounding like a chipmunk but I'd love to know what he'd sound like singing "One More Time."

The Beeb has a series where David Attenborough reflects on random things: the evolution of the kiwi bird, climbing a rope in South America and the spice trade. One of the episodes was about the Charnia fossil. As a boy, he was an avid fossil hunter but he never hunted in the Charnwood Forest near his home in central England (near Birmingham) because he knew the rocks were too old, that is Precambrian. A schoolboy found the first specimen there in 1957 which changed our understanding of that era. The fossil, first thought to be algae, appear to be some kind of soft coral. The fossil is at first glance not that exciting but it has huge repercussions. Until then, some thought the Precambrian was devoid of life. Since then, more varieties of Chania have been found. Apparently, Newfoundland is one of the best places to look for them. Of course, it's difficult to make sweeping statements when the Precambrian was so freaking long-that is, 4000 to 543 Million years ago freaking long. These fossils are now considered to come from the Ediacaran period, which directly preceeded the Cambrian. Here is a picture of the original Charnia on display at the Leicester New Walk Museum.

Final thoughts and first and last lines for The Likeness

This book was a little slow to get out of the gate but holy wow did it suck me in. I'm not sure what I'm going to rate it. It's between 4 and 5 stars though. I was so chuffed I thought of it being reminiscent of The Secret History but I see so did everyone else. As Julie Brown once said, original ideas are hard.

Oh well, anyways first and lasts.

First:

(Prologue): Some nights, if I'm sleeping on my own, I still dream about Whitethorn House. In the dream it's always spring, cool fine light with a late-afternoon haze.

This is Lexie Madison's story, not mine. I'd love to tell you one without telling you the other but it doesn't work that way.

Last:

Time works so hard for us, Daniel told me once. I hope those last few minutes worked like hell for her. I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.

Another great part of The Likeness

Breathtakingly sad this book is. But it gives you a lot to think about. Also, Cassie's policeman boyfriend is SO boring.

After the thing is over (Daniel confessed, although I don't know for sure he did it, Cassie shot him, everyone knows she was a cop and hates her and Naylor has burned the house down- who needs metaphor when everything can literally go up in flames), Sam proposes which prompts this thought:

There's so little mercy in this world. Lexie sliced straight through everyone who got between her and the door, people she had laughed with, worked with, laid down with. Daniel, who loved her like his blood, sat beside her and watched her die, sooner than allow a siege on his spellbound castle. Frank took me by the shoulders and steered me straight into something that he knew could eat me alive. Whitethorn House let me into its secret chambers and healed my wounds, and in exchange I set my careful charges and I blew it to smithereens. Rob, my partner, my shieldmate, my closest friend, ripped me out of his life and threw me away because he wanted me to sleep with him and I did it. And when we had all finished clawing chunks off each other, Sam, who had every right to give me the finger and walk away for good, stayed because I held out my hand and asked him to.

A great line from The Likeness

Not sure if I like this as well as In the Woods but I do like it. Here's a line as Cassie contemplates her doppelganger whose "real" identity discovered by the FBI turned out to be fake as well:

No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.

And later:

Sam's eyes were huge and dark as if I had hit him, and Frank was watching me in a way that made me think if I had any sense I'd be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles through cool blue water without once needing to breath. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.


Same thing as the last book, and yet different. You can pinpoint, especially in retrospect, the point where Cassie's loyalties shift. One decision to withhold evidence to protect Lexie, who is not even Lexie really. Then another to protect the housemates. She actively misleads the investigation. Soon she is having fantasies about spending Christmas in the house wrapping presents (the story takes place in the spring.) Does she want to find Lexie's killer or just disappear? I knew this wouldn't end well but I suspect it will end quite badly now. I wonder if Rob will re-surface?

Adios Discovery

NPR had a great story by Nell Greenfield Boyce the other day about the retirement of the space shuttle Discovery. It landed on March 9, which was yesterday as of this writing. Discovery was considered something of the mascot of the shuttle program. It was the most flown craft not only in the program, but in space history. It was the first shuttle to return to flight after the Columbia and Challenger disasters. It's the oldest shuttle still running in the fleet. There have been stories about all of the museums vying for the retired shuttles. Discovery is going to Smithsonian which is fitting. The Guardian also has a story about it and a podcast I've yet to listen to.It will take a while to drain all of the dangerous fuels and other things that make it suitable for sitting in a museum rather than a NASA hangar.

Discovery is also the shuttle famously attacked by woodpeckers.


Endeavour's final flight is in April and Atlantis, in June, will be the final space shuttle flight. With the future of NASA uncertain and the Constellation program scrapped, it's bittersweet really. Even though experts point out that it's the most expensive and dangerous method of transportation devised by mankind. I can't find a link to that quote precisely but here's a story about man's 10 most expensive accidents. And the reason the shuttle is being scrapped is that its expense is part of the reason we have been stuck in low Earth orbit for the last 30 years. Obama wants us to go to asteroids and Mars.

(Where is the geographical context? Chernobyl was in the Ukraine. I've never even heard of the oil rig.)

Nova had a typically fantastic show about the repair mission for the Hubble. That shuttle was Atlantis, the year 2006 (it was delayed by the 2003 Columbia disaster.)

So, BBC 4 has a new series starring David Attenborough which I subscribed to without knowing much about it, but it's the Beeb and Attenborough so you know it's good.  Last week's episode was on the kiwi bird. They are flightless of course but also interesting because of some non-bird like behaviors, like shitting to mark their territory.  He says in some ways they are more like badgers. Attenborough explained that the separation of New Zealand's land mass from Australia negated the need to evolve flight and its concomitant energy costs.

Discovery Channel aired that show Life last year which I only watched part of (although I did buy the book.) In the US, Oprah narrated it but the UK got Attenborough. Uhm, ripoff?

Study in Pink versus Scarlet and personality disorders unbound

I watched the first episode of the BBC's excellent Sherlock series last night. I can't say I'm a connoisseur of Holmes adaptations but I'd call this one at least one of the best ever.

I want to list some of the similarities and differences between the Scarlet and Pink versions while they are fresh in my mind:

• Rache=revenge in Scarlet, Rachel in Pink (funny inside joke where he mocks an ME who postulates it's German too)
• Scarlet thread of murder running through life versus... a woman who wears a lot of pink
• Watson is returning from Afghanistan and needs a place to stay in both. Nice add of the cell phone clues to his background (and it was his sister. So funny.)
• I like the bromance and how everyone thinks they are a couple. Even Holmes at one point thinks Watson is hitting on him.
• Both killer are cabbies who kill with poison
• No Mormons this time. I guess they take enough of a beating over Big Love
• Much better showdown with the killer in the Pink version both on Holmes and Watson's parts
• Holmes writes a newspaper article on science of deduction but the update naturally turns it into a blog
• No Mormons means no Utah backstory. Hooray.
• Both killers have aneurysms. 
• Lestrade is likable here, more so than in the book although he's not really unlikable in the book either. Apparently, they cobbled him together from slightly different portrayals in the canon. 
• What? No Gregson?
• More victims. No revenge motive. Just the random fuckery of a personality disorder with too many IQ points

BTW, Holmes has this great line, "I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research." After I laughed, I thought wait-what's the difference? Turns out no one is really definite. A lot of it sounds like a sociopath is more prone to be what they call (or used to call) a disorganized offender, someone who is impulsive, sloppy and prone to being caught quickly. Whereas a psychopath is an organized offender. They are both Antisocial Personality Disorders and some are in favor of eliminating the distinction. Some also say a sociopath is more a product of a poor environment whereas a psychopath's problem is pathology, like something squirrelly with their amygdalas. Anyways, Holmes seems much more like a psychopath than a sociopath to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

First and last for A Study in Scarlet

First:

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.

Last:

"Never mind," I answered; "I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them. In the meantime you must make yourself contented with the consciousness of success like the Roman miser-

                "'Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo

                  Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplar in arca.'"

(From the Satires of Horace: "The public hiss at me, but I applaud myself at my house when I think about the money in my strongbox."

What I learned from A Study in Scarlet

Lots of random stuff. And a small complaint--there was no need for that lengthy interlude in Utah. You had me at Brigham Young and polygamist misogyny (as if there were another brand of polygamy.) You didn't need a 40 page interlude to convince me that Jefferson Hope was a stand-up guy. Also, unless those Mormons were seriously off course, they shouldn't have been turning right to reach the Rio Grande. This makes me wonder since Doyle was so otherwise meticulous if the maps of the American frontier were lacking in Victorian England. I wonder how I'd find that out.

I quibble, because I'm tedious.

Moving on, here is some stuff I learned from the book and the fabulous endnotes supplied in the Modern Library edition:

• enteric fever is typhoid. Even though I took typhoid oral vaccine before I went to Syria (a real pain because you have to keep it cold. Has live bugs in it), I have trouble keeping this straight so, once again, this is the stomach ailment you get from accidentally eating poo. Typhus, OTH, is spread by lice bites. It's what killed Wyatt Earp's wife and the rash is a classic symptom.
• Watson was injured in the Second Afghan War, which lasted from 1878-80. The short version of the story is the British were pissed about Russian meddling (as they have a long history of with this place) and it ended with a British victory, if all their aims weren't satisfied.
• Wondering about the First Afghan War? 1839-42. Also fought over Russian influence, which was more imagined than tangible. A change in government prompted the British to withdraw but not before the Brits tore up Kabul in retaliation for the massacre of Elphinstone's Army 
• This great line from Holmes. So true today, you need only look around the modern office. "What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done."
• Everyone knows Stradivari, the maker of the famous violin. But did you know he was a student of Amati? Early 17th century, Cremona, Italy. What made Stradivarius' so special? There's an ongoing argument about that. It could have been the wood, cause by a petite ice age in Europe during the 17th century that slowed tree growth, although that doesn't explain why all violins cranked out in Europe during this time were equally good. Others believe it was the varnish the wood was treated with. 
• Aqua Tofana is a tincture of arsenic named after the famous Italian entrepreneur, Guilia Tofana, who evidently made a living in the 17th century by selling poison to would-be widows in Naples and Rome. Although the footnotes say she killed 600 people, Wiki says that confession was obtained under torture so who knows.
• Wonder where the term bohemian came from? Scenes de la Vie de Boheme written by Henri Barger in 1848 and inspired by his itinerant artist friends. I guess I'd never given this much thought and assumed Bohemia was part of Germany. Wrong, although the Germans have occupied it. Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. Watson is reading this book while waiting for Holmes to return from following the old woman (really a man in drag) who claimed the duplicate of the found wedding ring. I find his reading choice endearing. He really was ill-treated by the Rathbone film era.
• "Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire." A fool can always find a greater fool to admire him.

First and last for In the Woods

First:

What I warn you to remember is that I'm a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.

Last:

I watched for a long time, until my mobile began vibrating insistently in my pocket and the rain started to come down more heavily, and then I put out my cigarette and buttoned my coat and headed back to the car.

Great lines from In the Woods

Just finished this. Loved it. Maybe it's too unhappy and not all neatly resolved enough for American audiences. And sometimes I hated the narrator. But that was the point.

Two snippets from near the end. This is Ryan's recollection of the only moment he remembers post Operation Vestal about the summer Peter and Jamie disappeared, the day that Jamie learned-erroneously-that her mother would not be sending her to boarding school in the fall:

Jamie screamed, "I'm gonna stay here forever!" and danced on the wall like a thing made of air, "Forever and ever and ever!" And I just yelled, wild wordless whoops, and the wood caught our voices and tossed them outwards in great expanding ripples, wove them into the whirlpool of leaves and the jink and bubble of the river and the rustling calling web of rabbits and beetles and robins and all the other denizens of our domain, into one long high paean.

This memory, alone of all my hoard, did not dissolve into smoke and slide away through my fingers. It remained-still remains-sharp-edged and warm and mine, a single bright coin left in my hand. I suppose that, if the wood was going to leave me only one moment, that was a kind one to choose.

And this so very melancholy scene where Ryan calls Cassie, who hasn't spoken to him in months, in the middle of the night after he hears she is engaged to Sam:

On the third ring, she said blurrily, "Maddox."

"Cassie," I said. "Cassie, you're not actually going to marry that boring little yokel. Are you?"

I heard her catch her breath, ready to say something. After a while she let it out again.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so so sorry. I love you, Cass. Please."

I waited again. After a long time, I heard a clunk. Then Sam, somewhere in the background, said, "Who was that?"

"Wrong number," Cassie said, farther away now. "Some drunk guy."

....

More low laughter, a rustle, a kiss; a long contented sigh. Then nothing but their breathing, easing back into tandem and gradually into sleep.

I sat there for a very long time, watching the sky lighten outside my window and realizing that my name hadn't come up on Cassie's mobile....I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.

A great line from In the Woods

I'm down to the last 50 pages and I can't really see not loving this book by the end.

Had to preserve this line, taken from when Ryan is in the bottom ninth of his huge fuckup: his boss found out what he's been hiding, he's been a flaming douche to nearly everyone, he got played by a psychopathic teenager AND Cassie isn't speaking to him. Now restricted to desk duty pending suspension, a detective everyone hates is floating around his desk trying to find out what's going on:

He was like a huge smug albatross waddling around my desk, squawking vacuously and crapping all over my paperwork.

Some fact checking

Last night I went with some friends of mine to a talk on Laos. Thom is in a group that meets once a month to hear a speaker and have dinner at the faculty club. The median age of the group is 60-something so I feel like a toddler there which is kind of cool.

Alas, they spend too much time yammering about member introductions and club business and it's kind of a snore, that part. And then the slide projector quit working so we didn't get to see enough of the pictures but I did learn that the ethnic group that we worked with in Laos was the Hmong. Although officially we were never there. The speaker also told us he had a silver watchband (which I got to see) that he had to hide in Laos or people would have cut his hand off to get it. He wears a watch on each arm, one is the silver one. Actually, I'm wondering why he does that? Doesn't the time dissonance between the two bother him? He said Laos still had a communist government. This is nominally correct although they appear to be more like socialists in recovery now. I don't know much about this part of the map other than what I've read about Vietnam and Cambodia. I should pick up a book on this.

Sometimes the dinner thing can be kind of tedious depending on who you sit with. Once we sat with a lady who did something with public health in the county so we had an interesting conversation about epidemic prevention and H1N1. Plus, she watched Star Trek. But another time, we sat with some....nice people who talked about the zoning laws in their rich suburb for 30 minutes. This is where the rules of polite society are some of the most chafing for me. You are boring me. I know it's hard to make conversation with strangers. Why can't I pull out a book and read? I don't care what your township's rules about streetlights are. It's not personal.

There was a nice retired dentist at our table though who didn't talk about zoning liked a few things I was familiar with: Indian food, Bhutan, Thomas Jefferson and Ken Follett. He also talked about a history book he was reading, the title of which escapes me because I had trouble hearing him and I'm also not sure he got it right. He said there had been a number of Magna Cartas in history to which I said-really? Specifically, one involving Charlemagne. I threw this in my mental fact-checking folder. Bad facts check in, they don't check out. Ideally.

Actually, he was correct so that's cool. Bonus, Thom leaned over to ask me what year the Magna Carta was and I said 1215 but I wasn't positive. And now, can I just say, up high! And you never know when having a map of Asia in your head or knowing the bibliography of Ken Follett can come in handy. I asked if he had read the cathedral books and he had but it was kind of loud in there and I couldn't hear that well so I dunno if he gave them the thumbs up.

First thoughts on In the Woods

So, I've been reading In the Woods for a few days. I was curious about it because it had won some awards and blogger praise but other people complained that it was slow or the ending was disappointing and unfortunately from the small smattering of GR reviews I've read, I know what the nature of the disappointment is so bollocks to people who say I don't want to spoiler stuff then promptly do.

I wonder now if the ending is so bad that people decided they didn't like the book. Or do they read a mystery solely for the mystery and its artistry is irrelevant? This book is smashing. I can't get up to make myself tea because I don't want to stop reading. But more than that, the construction of the book has the intricate delicacy of a Chinese puzzle box constructed seamlessly by a successful graduate of a creative writing program. There's simply no way Tana French didn't study writing somewhere. The leisurely buildup of dread, the meticulous choice of (unreliable?) narrator, the lovely prose, the rendering of minutiae of daily routine into page-turning moments.

I'm afraid there's going to be some nasty secret about Ryan come out at the end of the book for all the hints that things go to shite as well as his spotty memory and clearly imminent crackup. 

I learned that Knocknaree (a commuter town south of Dublin where the murders take place) means "hill of the King." Apparently, there are archeological sites there as well just as in the book.

I could almost type out half the book in the interest of footnoting lines that I liked. Here is a sex scene, or more properly the build-up to it. Not that I love sex scenes that much but it's awfully hard to write one and not sound silly (I have literary nightmares over the time Charlaine Harris wrote about a male suitor's "phallus") or like some romantic bosom heaver my best friend would have been reading in high school while swearing she read to learn about history. And seriously, Playboy does have good articles.

Anyways, this is lovely even if it probably is the beginning of the wreckage of the thus far sibling-like detective partnership of Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox:

We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I'm not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kisser her, and after a moment she kissed me back. I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course, what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.