Some random bits I learned from the DK Brain Training book

• The occipital lobe handles much of your visual sensing.
• The temporal lobes behind each ear are involved in the organization of speech, sound, memory and emotional response.
• The parietal lobes at the top of the brain handles sensations like temperature, pain, pressure. They also assist in spatial awareness.
• Behind the forehead are the frontal lobes which is the home of the personality. That's where we solve problems, retrieve memories and control impulses. It is not surprising then that that area is more developed in humans than in any other animal.
• The limbic system is made up of the amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamu and hippocampus. 
• The amygdala activates emotional responses from fear to euphoria.
• The hypothalamus is the control region for communication between brain and body, such as the rising of blood pressure.
• The thalamus receives auditory and visual information and relays them to the cerebral cortex, where information is processed.
• The cerebellum, at the back of the brain, controls movement and balance and was the first part of the brain to evolve. It controls involuntary muscle actions.
• The hippocampus is responsible for spatial reasoning. Reading maps can increase its size-its been shown to be larger in cab drivers.

Some random military wisdom gleaned from The Last Kingdom. Also, feline berserkers.

On leadership:

An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strengh.

I'm thinking of the endless committees and meetings at work. Of the top-heavy procedures and decision matrices (whoever coined that term should be fed to the Danes.) Also, that stupid plotline on The Office where Michael and Jim were co-managers. You also halve the funniness.

On the logistics of war:

The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the horse who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins. And, if you keep horses in a fortress, it is about shoveling dung.

Of battle tech:

I like bowmen. They can kill at a great distance and, even if their arrows do not kill, they make an enemy nervous. Advancing into arrows is a blind business, for you must keep your head beneath the rim of the shield, but shooting a bow is a great skill. It looks easy, and every child has a bow and some arrows, but a man's bow, a bow capable of killing a stag at a hundred paces, is a huge thing, carved from yew and needing immense strength to haul, and the arrows fly wild unless a man has practiced constantly, and so we never had more than a handful of archers. 

On the shield wall as defense:

You can hear a shield wall being made. The best shields are made of lime, or else of willow, and the wood knocks together as men overlap the shields. Left side of the shield in front of your neighbor's right side, that way the enemy, most of whom are right-handed, must try to thrust through two layers of wood.



Of heaven:

Fight the hoarde. Sing and cry: Valhalla, I am coming.

Not. That's the opening track on Led Zeppelin III, of course.

Speaking of Viking kittens, you need to click this link or face the wrath of Odin. It just goes to YouTube, nothing crazy. Also, Odin motherfuckers!

Poetry of winter

I listened to a Poetry Foundation podcast about how various poets handled the symbolism of winter. First was Longfellow (a resident of Portland, Maine like the author of the piece, Annie Finch. Tour his house.) Here Longfellow uses himself to better understand nature.

Snow-flakes

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807–1882

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take

Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

Even as the troubled heart doth make

In the white countenance confession,

The troubled sky reveals

The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,

Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair,

Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,

Now whispered and revealed

To wood and field.

Finch's next choice was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm always kind of interested when she comes up because I remember reading at least one literary source that made fun of people who liked her poetry and lumped her in with Rod McKuen-harsh.

Finch brought that up after the poem, that she's popular but unfairly considered, in her eyes, something of a guilty pleasure. According to her biography, Ann Sexton even once admitted sheepishly to Sylvia Plath that she liked Millay (although she also referred to her as old fashioned at one point.) In contrast with the Longfellow, here Millay is using winter to understand herself better, specifically coming to terms with aging:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

This was followed by a Wallace Stevens piece which is interesting for not taking the viewpoint of someone struggling with winter:

The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens 1879–1955

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Since I've mentioned the author, I might as well include her poem which they concluded the podcast with, "Winter Solstice Chant":

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,

now you are uncurled and cover our eyes

with the edge of winter sky

leaning over us in icy stars.

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,

come with your seasons, your fullness, your end.

Poem of the Day

Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. Reason I like it: sensory overload woven into emotional and intellectual tangents.

The author, Ofelia Zepeda, has a phd in linguistics. She is a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation. No, I had no idea what that meant either. Here is more info. The O'odham are yet another Native American group that got screwed in sundry land deals and-bonus-they had the misfortune of living astride what became the border of the US and Mexico, thus preventing them from crossing it freely to this day. 

The border issue is something I was unaware of until I watched Frozen River recently. Unlike the US/Canada border, there was no dual citizenship granted.

Smoke in Our Hair by Ofelia Zepeda

The scent of burning wood holds

the strongest memory.

Mesquite, cedar, piñon, juniper,

all are distinct.

Mesquite is dry desert air and mild winter.

Cedar and piñon are colder places.

Winter air in our hair is pulled away,

and scent of smoke settles in its place.

We walk around the rest of the day

with the aroma resting on our shoulders.

The sweet smell holds the strongest memory.

We stand around the fire.

The sound of the crackle of wood and spark

is ephemeral.

Smoke, like memories, permeates our hair,

our clothing, our layers of skin.

The smoke travels deep

to the seat of memory.

We walk away from the fire;

no matter how far we walk,

we carry this scent with us.

New York City, France, Germany—

we catch the scent of burning wood;

we are brought home.

The part where I talk about my dog

I took Colby to be groomed a few weeks ago and, apropos of my habit of getting excited by trivial triumphs, I was thrilled to see my groomer put his picture on their Facebook page. This does not mean that I have now developed a fondness for Facebook which is generally a perplexing and incredibly annoying white noise system to me. "X doesn't like rude people." "Y is glad when it will stop raining." "Z just took a dump." 5 people liked this.

I digress. Some facts about my dog: he's from the pound, he has epilepsy which means the vet starts contemplating how early he'll be paying off his school loans every time I call, despite a predilection for eating his own poo (and duck poo-he really likes duck poo) he's a picky eater, he recently learned to drum on me with his paw when he wants attention, he won't poop unless he has walked for 20-30 minutes, he doesn't like to pee in the snow, he cries about everything, his fur is like a Swiffer to mud, grass and leaves and he really likes the hair dryer so while I'm still getting it out of the bathroom cabinet he's already jumping around and wanting me to dry him (not "blow" him as my friend Crystal inevitably calls it. Nothing like a good bestiality joke at my expense.) So he's pretty fucking annoying. It's a good thing he also is stuffed animal cute.

 

Isn't this a shitty picture? I got it off of Facebook and had to resize it.  I have thus far in life avoided the perils of Photoshop. Maybe that'll be the new task I tackle one day. 

Until then, here's a better picture-one of my favorites:

More from The Last Kingdom

It's like porn for history nerds and Anglophiles.

The subject today is the town of Gyruum, now called Jarrow on the northeast coast of Britain. The first monastery was founded there in 674, per the Cornwell reader blog. The Venerable Bede wrote his history of the English Church there, finishing around 731.

The blog mentions the monastery was destroyed by the Vikings around 860 which doesn't totally jive with the books dates (It's off by around 8 or 10 years?) But why quibble? It would take some doing to dig into the minutiae of this event and Cornwell clearly has done a lot of research. At any rate, Ragnar and company return from conquering East Anglia (leaving Alfred's Wessex the only sovereign English kingdom left) to quell some civil unrest in York, their home turf. Take it away, Bernard:

It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monastery's treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks and fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the river Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement...

And there, people were tortured and killed in what the monks had decided was now a holy war. Women were raped by monks while nuns cheered them on. Ok, the Danes are doing the same shit themselves but I love this cheeky history for pointing out the Church proper was often (or never) any better than their opponents. As retribution, Ragnar finds out where the biggest monasteries and convents in the area are and his men burn them to the ground and rape and pillage, etc. Which all leads to this funny coda from Uhtred:

The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape...I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that where was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvelous tale how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.

None of that happened. We arrived, they screamed, the young ones were raped, and then they died...Still priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet, which was just as well.

(disclaimer: Needless to say, I do not endorse rape, murder and pillaging in general and certainly not against monks and nuns.)


One of the recurring themes in the book is the Danes' befuddlement at Christianity. There is another great scene where Edmund of East Anglia surrenders to the Danes but demands they be baptized and become Christian as a condition of his surrender which the translator conflated with "washing" which confused the Danish side. Ivar finally understands with Uhtred's help and having asked earlier about a picture of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian says he will agree to become Christian if Edmund, too, can live after being pierced by arrows. Ivar isn't even being cruel here, he genuinely wants to know. And it's logical, really. If the English god can protect you from arrows, it's worth switching sides or adding him to your pantheon at least. Edmund, the poor schmuck, agrees when he realizes he's talked himself into a corner and Ivar and his men shoot him with arrows. The results were predictable. As to the fate of the real Edmund, it's not clear. Also predictable, he's considered a martyr too.

It's a famous subject in Renaissance art, the Sebastian story. Like many a tale of Catholic miracles, it's rather anti-climactic since he after the arrows didn't work, the Romans allegedly clubbed him to death.

Here is Sebastian, in happier times:

As always, the loincloth is holding on just enough to spare us pubes.

What I've looked up thus far for The Last Kingdom

Bernard Cornwell is insanely prolific. He is British and worked for several years for the BBC before meeting an American woman and moving here. He started writing when he couldn't obtain a Green Card. The Last Kingdom is the first book in his Saxon series. There are 5, I'm not certain if there will be more. He's also written about the Napoleonic Wars (his Sharpe series which has over 20 books and was a BBC series with Sean Bean), the Arturian legend and the 100 Years War.

So, The Last Kingdom is narrated by a boy from Northumbria (now Northern England and South-East Scotland) named Uhtred. His father and older brother get killed in a skirmish with the invading Danish Vikings at Eoferwic (York) and Uhtred becomes a Viking prisoner of sorts, although he's really more of a foster son for one of their leaders. His continuing observations on how Christianity makes the English weak are amusing. I hope the story doesn't turn on some boring Churchy epiphany that makes him turn in his Thor charm.

Cornwell does a good job of making the history immediate and accessible. What most impressed me is that he makes the battle scenes understandable. To me this is traditionally where a narrative gets hopelessly jumbled. And bonus, there is a map.

{Side note, I heard a BBC World Book club podcast the other day with the Indian author Kiran Desai. One reader said it's people's responsibility to look up relevant maps and other research, not the author's while a woman in her book club disagreed. Since Desai says even people who have read her book The Inheritance of Loss think it's about India's border dispute with Pakistan (it's Nepal) and coupled with how shitty most Americans' grasp of geography is, it's a no brainer to me more books should have them. And yes it's ridonkulous people can have read the book and still not be able to keep that shit straight.}

Uhtred's family home, Castle Bamburgh, is now Bamberg and the county seat of Northumberland today. The Castle still exists and is a tourist site. Schedule your wedding there today. Nothing like the site of several ancient bloody sieges for the exchange of vows. Pass the ladyfingers.

The story is a retelling of the exploits of Alfred the Great of Wessex, as seen through Uhtred's eyes. The story opens in 866 AD. Alfred ruled from 871-899. He is of course the Anglo-Saxon king who turned the tide on the Danish invasion of Britain. Wessex, in South-West England, is considered to have lead the unification of Anglo-Saxon England after Alfred's death. It's also where Thomas Hardy was from.

I wonder, if Alfred had failed and Christianity had faded into the dustbins of theology (can't decide if that would be good or bad) and Odin worship were instead the norm would Marvel be putting out The Mighty Jesus comic books these days? I can't imagine they'd be that interesting without Mjölnir.

My understanding is that Alfred is considered a Catholic saint in some quarters but not officially. Nevertheless, Catholic Encylopedia has an article about him.  In addition to beating back the Vikings, he also translated Boethius and Bede (among others) into Anglo-Saxon. There's more info about him here on the official British Monarchy site. Of course.

I'm really digging learning the old Anglo-Saxon names for towns in England. My favorite thus far is Snotengaham which you might conclude by looking at long enough is Nottingham. And look at what I found--a whole blog dedicated to deeper understanding of Cornwell's novels. Apparently Boots (available at select Bath and Body stores) is headquartered there.

Final thoughts on Damage

I hate motherfuckers in committed relationships who can't keep their shit in their pants. I suppose this story was satisfying to have the destructiveness of cheating rendered in such a literal fashion. But then again, only the narrator suffers. Anna goes on to return to Peter, her on and off fuck buddy to whom she lost her virginity and who is also a cheater and gets pregnant. Boo. Predatory hoes should come to bad ends in fiction always but  I admire Josephine Hart for having the chutzpah to go the other way.

This book was well-written and its tragic mood seems to be staying with me (or maybe it's the rain that is so gloom-inducing.) I really liked the final series of confrontations between the narrator and his wife, Ingrid, after everything has come to light and Martyn has plunged to his death. Here are her final words to the narrator, "Goodbye. I don't mean this to sound cruel, but what a pity you didn't die, in some accident or something, last year." Well, yes it sounds so much less cruel when you preface it like that. Nice touch.

On to first and last.

First:

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. 

Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours and are at home.

Last:

For those of you who doubt it, this is a love story.

It is over.

Others may be luckier.

I wish them well.

The movies that make me piss myself

Lists. I like to make them. I like to revise them. As long as they aren't composed of anything practical. Ask me to make a list of my favorites songs with synthesized seagull sounds in them though (#1: "It's my Life" by Talk Talk) and I'm in heaven.

I've been watching reruns of Carpenter's The Thing on cable recently which is still a majorly misanthropic paranoid masterpiece. I remember going to see this with my Dad when it came out. It came out the summer of ET so it's kind of curious we ended up seeing this but whatever. I also remember my Dad throwing a fit about a woman with a crying baby. I am most definitely the nemesis of fools who bring babies to movies (particularly evening movies. Which are loud horror movies. Do you put beer in the baby bottle to make baby nap too?) but the whole scene turned inevitably into an embarrassing "I demand to see the manager" fiasco. At any rate, I bring this up because this protracted interlude worked out quite swimmingly in the end because as a result I missed the horrible dog massacre scene. I still have to change the channel when this scene approaches-I think I've only watched it once through splayed fingers. Cannot handle bad things happening to doggies, even outlandish fictional things.

And watching The Thing caused me to seek out John W. Campbell's original story "Who Goes There" which is a hard book to find in these parts. Hooray for the internets.

Horror is one of those maligned and abused genres like science fiction back in the day. It's easy to do on the cheap. It's easy to do exploitatively. For every Halloween, there are 10 I Spit on Your Grave's.

(btw, does anyone else think Last House on the Left is a ripoff of Bergman's The Virgin Spring?)

Here are some horror flicks, in no particular order, that still threaten my bladder control even when they shouldn't:

• The Thing--of course I've already mentioned it. Still utterly freaky and stomach churningly gross. You are stuck in the Antarctic. One or more of you isn't human. There's some kind of extraterrestrial spider monster that will take over the world if you don't kill every last one of it. Even Kurt fucking Russell and Keith David are freaking out so you know that you would be Thing bait. Also has one of the greatest line deliveries ever courtesy of David Clennon, "You've gotta be FUCKING kidding." If you ever have to give CPR, I guarantee you one scene in particular is going to flash before your eyes.

•  The Exorcist--is there a choice that's more obvious? Linda Blair pees on the floor and does naughty things with a crucifix. I blame Catholic school for planting the seed of Satan panic in my head that still causes me to want to cross myself and promise to go to confession when I watch this even though I've been an atheist for several years. Damn it Sister Regina, this is not fucking based on a true story.And while I'm on the subject, Kiss is not in league with the devil.

• The Omen--second most obvious choice. "It's all for you, Damien." Damn it, that still freaks me out. Skip the shitty remake and the sequels. My parents had this book when I was a kid and I remember continually shuffling it so it sat behind other books on the shelf so that the 666 on the spine wouldn't taunt me. 

• The Howling--first, can you believe that is the Doctor from Voyager? The chick who played Terri was indeed a terrific screamer and whoever composed that extremely unnerving soundtrack should have won an award. Apparently it's Pino Donaggio, also responsible for Don't Look Now, Dressed to Kill, Carrie and that stupid haunted doll flick Tourist Trap (my parents getting Showtime when I was around 10 insured I would see many a shitty movie like this one.) Bummer moment: someone shoots John Steed. 

• Psycho--I'm just so damn cliche. However, even though I know it's coming, I still fight the urge to scream when Vera Miles finds "Mrs. Bates" in that rocking chair and spins her around. Apparently, the cast and crew were afraid this movie would look silly and Hitch told them just wait until you see it with the soundtrack. Doubts erased. Many showers changed to baths.

• Paranormal Activity 1 and 2--either these movies' leisurely pace, suburban settings and slowly ramped up chain of demonic meddling will leave you a nervous wreck that is afraid to walk into a dark room for the next day or so or you'll be bored and entirely unmoved. I have talked to plenty of people in the second category but what the hell-have you no pulse, people? They did an amazing job of weaving the storyline from the first into the second. Also, dirty pool adding a dog and a baby to the mix in the sequel. 

•  The Amityville Horror--is this movie really scary? I mean, the scene with the demonic pig thing eyeballing Margot Kidder just looks ridiculous now. I just remember my parents taking me to see this in the theatre (I would have been around nine) and me coming home convinced that the devil was going to make the walls bleed ANY MINUTE. I have to say even though this is laughably bad, what was scary at 9 is scary forever on some level. The sequel not so much. I'm so glad Ryan Reynolds career has been successful enough that he doesn't have to star in shit like this anymore. I wonder what became of the lawsuit regarding the sequel by the way--I remember the real-life guy sued the movie makers for suggesting that he was homicidal. Hey, he's a fraud not a killer. Get it straight.

• Poltergeist--I heard lots of bitchery form cinephiles that Steven Spielberg ruined Tobe Hooper's vision. I still think this was plenty freaky. Again, the cozy suburban setting makes you feel safe. Then a long-tongued closet monster comes after you and there are skeletons in the swimming pool. Also, clowns. Automatically eligible.

•  Halloween--I know so many people who say "I don't watch horror movies" blah blah blah and I try to get them to watch this one. There is almost no blood for starters-you are either remembering wrong or remembering one of the vastly inferior sequels. It's all suspense, pacing, camera-work and a great score from Carpenter.

• The Prince of Darkness--Carpenter was really on when he was on. I think it's time I forgave him for Ghosts of Mars. This was panned when it came out like The Thing but people seem to appreciate it more these days. Satanic space goop. Physics. Donald Pleasance. The Brotherhood of Sleep (sounds awesome-can I join?) Alice Cooper kills someone with a bicycle.  In fact, you will not be saved.

• Salem's Lot--sure it was a TV movie about vampires with Starsky in it (or was the blonde one Hutch? I never could keep them straight.) It's also directed by Tobe Hooper and written by Stephen King so it's ok to admit this TV movie made you scared of scraping noises at the window for a few days. Or years. 

I'm sure there are more. I don't want to cheat and put something like Bob Roberts on here (although Republicans are kind of scary.) I'll have to expand this when inspiration hits.

On IQ tests and other jive

So, someone convinced me recently to get my IQ tested if they paid for it. I took the tests last Saturday and it wasn't that bad actually as the whole process took about 90 minutes. 

The first is the Wonderlic which I just assumed was some convoluted acronym but it's the dude's name. A perfect score is 50. Apparently, they estimate that if your chosen profession is "warehouse", you will score a 14 while an average IQ is 20. I think I did ok at this one but because of the 12 minutes/50 question restriction, I didn't waste much time on anything that started out like, "Sally has 10 apples, Dave has 7.5 apples. How many apples will they have to eat to get to Dayton by 3pm if one of them is on the South Beach Diet?"

The second test was the Mensa Admissions Test. That was longer. Lots of visual reasoning and some more word problems. I ate it on that latter section.  Also, a girl who sat next to me stood up and reached over me for a pencil. Strangers touching and hovering over me--do not want.

During the course of taking these tests and talking to Dennis and Googling, I've learned there are a surprising number of high IQ societies. One called Triple Nine posts its requirements online and I see I'm already too dumb to be a member (they want an ACT score of 32, I got a 28. They want an SAT of 1450, I got 1100-something. Ouch. They want an IQ of 149, according to an online test which isn't valid anyways I'm around 144.) Triple Nine only has about 980 members worldwide though so it's not like I'm missing out on world of social interaction.

At least if I am shitcanned from Mensa, there is always Tensa. It's all kind of irrelevant anyways. What would I get out of joining Mensa anyways? Maybe I'd meet Geena Davis or Alan Rachins. Mmmm...LA Law.

April is National Poetry Month-and almost over

Who keeps track of this stuff? Someone at book group last night mentioned that April was also Jazz Appreciation Month. Cue Coltrane, somebody.

Anyways, I do like poetry when I understand it and reading the local library's blog clued me in that you can sign up for the poetry of the day email from the National Poetry Foundation.

Here is today's poem by Matthew Zapruder. I experience my literature primarily, in fact nearly exclusively, visually so I like the image of the typewriter key necklace:

April Snow

By Matthew Zapruder 

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world

is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep

their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred

waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle

when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows

the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.

I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various

faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t

want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep

I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces

of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.

I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike

on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

 

First thoughts on Damage

It's hard to believe this was Josephine Hart's first novel. And that she had the moxie to turn what could have been a Judith Krantz novel or something just skin crawlingly tasteless into such a beautiful sliver of literature. That story being a middle-aged British politician who has lived a successfully respectable but passionless life  having an intense affair with his son's girlfriend/fiance. I loved the Louis Malle film, even more so because midway through my reaction was "This shit is weird" but by the end I was enthralled. And horrified. I am guessing the book follows the novel pretty closely which means Martyn, the son, is approaching a tragic end.

Of course I liked the film because I love Louis Malle (with the exception of Pretty Baby which is well-made but some of the scenes walk the skeevy edge of child porn. Naked 12 year old girls. Do not want.) 

Josephine Hart is Irish, but lives in England.She was a theatre producer and director of Haymarket Publishing before she turned author. Apparently two of her other novels, Sin and The Reconstructionist, have been optioned as films.

The entire book feels like it was chiseled into sharp prose so much of it is arguably a great line. Here are a few:

We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfilfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Had I died at fifty I would have been a doctor, and an established politician, though not a household name...But I did not die in my fiftieth year. There are few who know me now, who do not regard that as a tragedy.

(here's a bit of foreshadowing)...

Children are the greatest gamble. From the moment they are born, our helplessness increases. Instead of being ours to mould and shape after our best knowledge and endeavour, they are themselves. From their birth they are the centre of our lives, and the dangerous edge of existence.

Those who are lucky should hide. They should be grateful. They should hope the days of wrath will not visit their home. They should run to protect all that is theirs, and pity their neighbour when the horror strikes. But quietly, and from a distance. 

I have sometimes looked at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew....Nothing. They look out serenely, a terrible warning to us all. 'No, I didn't know. Just like you.'...so I know that in whatever photographs were taken of me at that time, my face will gaze back at you confident, a trifle cold, but basically unknowing. It is the face of a man I no longer understand. I know that bridge that connects me to him. But the other side has disappeared. Disappeared like some piece of land the sea has overtaken. There may be some landmarks on the beach, at low tide, but that is all. 

(on lying to his wife, after he follows Martyn and Anna to France. The evolution of a cheater's mindset though, is artfully laid out here)

It's so hideously easy, I thought. To tell her I was in Paris was risky, I could easily have concealed it. The new and strange shape I was assuming was hardening each day. The facile liar, the violent lover, the betrayer, would allow no return journey. My path was clear. I knew I was on a headlong rush to destruction..with a mix of restrained joy and cold deception that I began to find intoxicating. I felt not a shred of pity for anyone. That was the essence of my power....I left Paris in a triumph of moral degradation. 

Tales of ecstasy are endless tales of failure. For always comes separation.

And the most famous line from the movie uttered by Anna which, alas, I have heard since then at least one crazy bitch use as carte blanche benediction of her wackness:

That is my story, simply told. Please do not ask again. I have told you in order to issue a warning. I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

Philomathia: Gojira's roots

Ok, so maybe talking about Godzilla is not in good taste these days however NPR ran a story recently about how days after the Fukushima incident began in Japan, he became a trending topic on Wikipedia. That's....just odd.

One thing that really caught my attention during the story was a real event inspired the movie. Namely, the Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll in 1954. It's just impossible to imagine anyone thinking it would be acceptable to detonate a nuclear weapon-much less a hydrogen bomb-above ground although both the US and the Russians obviously have long histories of that. The yield was 15 megatons which was over double what they anticipated. In the process, they irradiated a Japanese fishing boat and their entire cargo of fish. At least one sailor died as a direct result. Even worse, after the US tried to cover it up, they later admitted around 100 additional fishing boats had been exposed and some of the Marshall Islands had to be evacuated. This story has some Chernobyl-esque touches to it, no? Fucking assholery. I don't even know who to blame so I've decided to hate on the late Edward Teller (the man Carl Sagan blamed for the hydrogen bomb and a whole lot of bullshit that followed.)

Curious about the crater? Naturally, someone has mapped it. 

I'm tempted to end on a positive note and mention my favorite Godzilla movie. I wonder if that's in bad taste.

Well, fine. It's Godzilla Versus Ghidrah, the Three-headed Monster From Space-which I am a proud owner of thanks to the Friends of the Library discard sale. My second favorite is that Arrested Development episode.

Final thoughts on Will You Please be Quiet, Please?

I love Raymond Carver when he's at the top of his game, but I don't always love Raymond Carver (apropos of my IQ test today, I feel like a Venn Diagram would be useful here.) I finished his first short story collection and it was wobbly at times. When the stories didn't work, I was reading them with half a mind to what the odd, melancholy kathunk of an ending would be. Like at the end of "The Student's Wife" where the woman who has spent the night trying to get her husband to entertain her insomnia by talking to her about past vacations and favorite things gets down on her knees and prays to God for help. Or in "How About This?" when a couple attempts to relocate to her father's cabin in the woods only to find it too primitive and the wife says "We just have to love each other."

The stories I liked best were:

• "Fat": a waitress dwells on the experience of serving an unusually zaftig diner and decides "My life is going to change. I feel it."
• "What's in Alaska?": an evening of trying out the neighbor's new bong gets the carpet pulled out on the reader when they learn what the husband already knows (I think-these Carver characters and their passivity)
• "Nobody Said Anything": a young boy skips school to go fishing. Meanwhile, he's only vaguely aware of his parents' marriage violently disintegrating in the background. And he brings home a giant fish that's actually a snake. 
• "Night School": a young divorced man living with his parents meets two hard older dames at a bar and ends up walking with them in search of a car so they can play surprise visit with their literacy class instructor.
• "Put Yourself in My Shoes": a wife drags her reluctant writer husband to drop in unannounced on the couple whose house they rented briefly at Christmas time. Hilarious awkwardness ensues. So, did they own a cat and use their linens or not? 
• "Jerry and Molly and Sam": I should hate this cheating bastard for dumping his kids' dog in a strange neighborhood but he's somehow both too pathetic and relatable for me to successfully pull it off.

Final thoughts and first and last for Notes From Underground

I frequently have fantasies of having the financial means to quit my job and then spending my time reading and rarely talking to others. Then I read this book and look at Underground Man and think, maybe that's... not healthy. Granted, he was a self-defeating sad sack and prostitute bully long before he barricaded himself in his apartment and contemplated his bad liver and any slight the world at large had ever visited upon him.

Despite the footnotes, I don't quite understand how his poor ass was able to afford his servant Apollon. Do you suppose they are the Russian Jeeves and Bertie?

I much preferred the narrative of "Apropos of the Wet Snow" (a reference to a frequent literary description for St. Petersburg) to the "Underground" manifesto. I do understand the reason for the order though.

First:

I am a sick man....I am a wicked man.

Last:

However, the "notes" of this paradoxalist do not end here. He could not help himself and went on. But it also seems to us that this may be a good place to stop.

Philomathia: Lee Krasner

The Leonard Lopate Show had Gail Levin on who just wrote a new biography of Lee Krasner. Since I learned virtually everything I know about her from the Pollock movie, I'm glad someone restored this woman to her rightful place in the art world. She was an Abstract Expressionist herself, as Levin learned when she went to interview her about Pollock's legacy years ago and this she only found out because the gallery owner that was hosting the interview said, "You know, she's a painter too." She is best known for the 14 year period of her life she spent with Pollock and then for being a fierce protector of his legacy after he died in 1956. But her paintings are well regarded in the art world and do fetch high prices at auction-although, far less than Pollock's of course. Biography has a short piece about her here and here is a picture of Pollock and Krasner together, accompanied by a story about how artist/wives get short shrift in general (although there are big exceptions like Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo and since Krasner spent so much time promoting Pollock's legacy, perhaps this was partly inevitable.)

So one of the things I thought was interesting was Lopate mentioned he didn't want to get into the circumstances of Pollock's death (drunk driving accident that also killed a passenger) because his girlfriend Ruth Kligman who was also a passenger in the car at the time had been on the show. I remember her from the movie where she was played by Jennifer Connelly and which did not portray her in a flattering light. Apparently, she was a figure in the art world herself although it's debatable as to how much of that is because of her predilection for dating famous artists. She seemed to hook up with a lot of artists (Pollock of course, De Kooning, Jasper Johns, and she claimed Andy Warhol had a crush on her which, yeah ok.) And she was a painter herself-she has a website with a cross-section of her work. She died in 2010.

Final thoughts on Bangkok 8

Let's enumerate the qualities that make a detective novel protagonist, variety male: divorced, misanthropic, drinks too much or is in AA, if he has kids he is alienated from them. That's part of the reason that I thoroughly dug this book. Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a Buddhist but not above drugs or drinking if the situation calls for them (the Buddha says we must be flexible after all.) He's not married nor does he seek female companionship and is so trustworthy around women that a performer friend asks him to help her practice her act, busting balloons by shooting darts out of her lady area. He doesn't take bribes but doesn't mind the practice as he understands how it keeps the wheels turning. In all seriousness, I envy his zen while realizing what a fucked up statement that is.

I think the story could have been outlandish in other hands (murder by cobras on crank, forced gender reassignment surgery, that FBI agent who becomes instantly petulant that Sonchai doesn't want to play "Do you like me, circle yes or no"-ok, she's still ridonkulous), it was all handled well by John Burdett. Who is apparently a non-practicing British attorney in Hong Kong. I do have to wonder if the reason most of the Americans are rubes or villains (the big exception is Bradley's older brother Elijah) is because of the author's nationality.

I feel like one of the farangs described in the novel, totally seduced by Thailand although I've never been there and I obviously wouldn't be going to hang out in Patpong (well, the people-watching would be quite excellent.) I feel an Thai-themed reading jaunt coming on. After I read the book club choice for April that is. Nastrovya!

First and last for Bangkok 8

First:

The African-American in the gray Mercedes will soon die of bites from Naja siamensis, but we don't know that  yet, Pichai and I (the future is impenetrable, says the Buddha.)

Last:

Inside, our live entertainment is singing "Bye Bye Blackbird."

Naja siamensis is a spitting cobra, one of the six species found in Asia. It appears that all Najas are cobras but not all cobras are Najas.

Some great lines from Bangkok 8

Does this accurately represent the Thai police force? I have no idea but the Western way of doing things is certainly not the global way of doing things so it wouldn't surprise me.

First, I have to love any character (incorruptible Buddhist cop, or arhat, Sonchai Jitpleecheep) who mourns his partner's murder in a unique manner. Specifically, getting stoned and dancing in a Bangkok brothel where his mother Nong, a retired prostitute, once worked:

I'm pretty far gone, of course. The yaa baa [meth] has fried my brains, and on top there has been beer and ganja. The mamasan turns the music up real loud and I'm dancing a blue streak. Dancing like a tart. Dancing like Nong the goddess, Nong the whore. ...The mamasan plays Tina Turner's "The Best" on the sound system and everyone screams, "Sonchai, Sonchai, Sonchai."...Nobody remembers Bradley [the American marine and murder victim], or if they do I don't remember them remembering. I am very stoned.

Sonchai explaining the Thai police force bribery system to the female FBI agent Jones (btw, her character seems like a rare misstep in a book full of solid, memorable ones. Would an FBI agent act so slutty, needy and childish? I hope not.):

"You must understand, the Royal Thai Police Force has always been way ahead of its time. It's run like a modern industry, every cop is a profit center."

And this exchange later when Jones throws a fit over the Thai way of doing things:

"Tell me where you want me to drop you off, because what I need right now is a big fix of crass Western culture. I'm gonna go back to the Hilton, order American food to be brought to my big, bland, air-conditioned room and watch CNN until I remember who I am. This is a magic-ravaged land, you know that? Coming here has made me appreciate whoever it was invented logic, because before logic I think the whole world was like this."

"That's true," I agree. "Magic is preindustrial."

A running counterpoint is a radio show that Sonchai listens to which is a really clever, non-clunky way of cluing the listener in on the finer points of Thai psychology and thickening the atmosphere to a stew-like consistency (It's also a running joke that no matter what the topic, the host keeps returning to his favorite talking point, the growing popularity of a dangerous penis enlarging surgery among Thai men.) Here is a Buddhist monk guest commenting on Western culture:

"Actually, the West is a culture of emergency: twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, drugs, wars on everything-watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? of course, if you didn't believe you could control everything, there wouldn't be an emergency, would there?"

(I question whether anyone is watching that much CNN in a Thai monastery but who knows. Maybe Anderson Cooper is a bodhisattva.)

And speaking of the Buddha, here is one of my favorite exchanges, between Sonchai and a young American named Ferral he has just rescued from the Hole (literally a pit outside of the station.) A little back story is needed here. The student came into the station and made a big show of dropping a small bag of marijuana at the counter. Sonchai explains to one of his counterparts the student did it so he could pay a bribe and then write about the experience on a website that specializes in stories of Americans "in peril" in the third world. This enrages his colleague who forces the student to smoke the bag of marijuana on the spot, burns the money and throws him in the hole for a few hours (which causes Sonchai to regret his honesty.) When Sonchai returns to the station, he finds the detective has left the station and the kid is still in the hole 10 hours later. Sonchai rescues him and the kid tells him he prayed to every deity he could, including Buddha who talked back (I'm sure the Up In Smoke-sized spliff had nothing to do with that):

He taps my arm. "The Buddha's great, isn't he? Terrific sense of humor. He tell you any of those jokes of his?"

"No, I don't think I've ever been quite that intimate."

Ferral shakes his head. "Cracked me up, man. Really cracked me up. Well, thanks for the experience."

...

I watch him go not without a tinge of envy. In nearly two decades of meditation the Buddha has not told me a single joke. Surely one would laugh for eternity?

When Sonchai and his late partner Pichai were young, they killed a yaa baa dealer. Sonchai's mother sent them to stay at a Buddhist monastery. The head monk was Sonchai's boss, Colonel Vikorn. Here he explains to another police colonel why Sonchai is such a pain in the ass to them:

"Tell me about yourself," Suvit says. "I mean, how did a wet little creep like you ever become a cop in the first place?"
"He was an accomplice to murder."
"Not a bad start," Suvit concedes.
"His mother's father was a close follower of my brother. He and his fellow felon spent a year at my brother's monastery....You don't know my brother. He can dismantle your mind and rebuild it the way some people take clocks apart and put them together again. Afterwards nothing works properly, but the thing still manages to tick. That's what he did with these two."

This book has some great scenes, too many for me to recreate and lots of funny moments like here where Sonchai forces his mother into finally telling him who his father was-an American serviceman who took her back to the States where she went into a culture shock freak out and ran back to Thailand:

"You deprived me of a crack at the presidency of the United States because you didn't like the food? That's very Thai."
"You got a crack at nirvana instead. What kind of Buddhist would you have been if I'd stayed in America?"
I choose to ignore this brilliant riposte. "I could have been an astronaut."
"No you couldn't, you can't stand heights."
"What did he do, what was his profession, what he a drafted man?"
"Drafted. He was going to be a lawyer."
"What? American lawyers are millionaires. I could have been a senator at least."
My mother has dried her eyes. She is a master of abrupt recovery. "Children of American lawyers all die of drug overdoses at an early age."


The whole chapter with the Russian expat former physicist now pimp Andreev Iamskoy is brilliant. I hope he returns in future books. The Buddha was a brilliant salesman because he sold nothing, literally. Now that's funny.

More research for Bangkok 8: Gold is estimable but jade is priceless

Jade figures prominently in this story and I really don't know a lot about it.

First, the Chinese character for jade (that the FBI agent points out in a store as proof of the owner's connection to China) is yu:

According to the book Chinese Calligraphy by Edoardo Fazzioli, the character represents 3 pieces of jade tied together with a string. The dot is a modern development added to distinguish the character from the one that means "king." The character for jade is a radical, meaning it's one of the base characters that form many other combinations.

I know almost nothing about Chinese script so I'm moving on before I really fuck it up to the subject of jade itself. It's actually two different minerals: jadeite ("hard jade") and nephrite ("soft jade") although people didn't realize that until microscopic examination in the 19th century. Jadeite is the rarer of the two so it's naturally more valuable. And the soft/hard designation is accurate but not that meaningful. Jadeite is indeed slightly harder on the Mohs scale. Jadeite appears in a larger number of colors than nephrite. The bright green variety of jadeite, colored by the element chromium, is called imperial jade. Because of the higher value associated with the green color, people have naturally taken to dying jade to simulate the color or passing a mineral like serpentine off as jade (its relative softness is what will give it away.) There is a WikiHow article that gives you the steps to determine whether your jade is the real deal or a rock from someone's backyard slathered in food coloring.

Jade can come in various shades of green mottled with white and in rarer instances yellow, black, pink or white. The Chinese actually valued the white nephrite and it is still valuable. There are 5 classes of Chinese nephrite if you really want to read more, the highest quality being Hetian.

Jade occupies a position in Chinese culture that extends beyond its market value. The Chinese have been using it since Neolithic times (a very hard period to nail down as it varies by region. Dates specific to jade use vary widely between sources so I'm not going to get bogged down in them.)  They only had the nephrite variety until jadeite was imported from Burma (still a world source) during the Qing dynasty, 1271-1368. There is more about China's love affair with jade here.

Jadeite was similarly valued by Mesoamerican cultures, starting with the Olmec.

The fabulous BBC4 radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, covered the topic of jade multiple times: an axe found in pre-Bronze Age Canterbury, a cup from 15th century Uzbekistan, and a disc inscribed by an 18th century Qing Dynasty emperor.

Finally, although the FBI agent makes a point of mentioning a jade sculpture is extremely valuable because its lack of color shows its age, I cannot find anything (yet) that indicates jade changes color as it ages. In fact, this jeweler's site says the contrary. I know it's a minor detail but it grates my cheese when a book, even a work of fiction, get some fact wrong.

More from Bangkok 8 and carbon dating the Voynich Manuscript

Bangkok 8 mentions the Hilton having a spirit house surrounded by phalluses because it it for males. Or something like that. I can't find any images of a spirit house garden for the Bangkok Hilton (the real one, not the prison) but Thai spirit houses are everywhere on the nets. And quite pretty.

This website has a selection of the various types. They are built to appease spirits and nearly every Thai home and business has them displayed in some prominent spot. They are typically birdhouse-sized although some seem to be doll house sized.  The pointed structures at the corners of the roof are intended to deflect evil spirits why they fall (why wouldn't they detract good spirits too? It's a mystery.) Here's some more about Thai spirit houses here. Interestingly, supposedly they are rarely occupied by birds despite their convenient size. They are also used in Burma, Cambodia and Laos.

I listened to this week's Skeptoid podcast this week about the Voynich Manuscript. I'd never heard of it but it's a famous medieval manuscript written in an as yet undecipherable language (it does appear to cryptologists to look like a language instead of gibberish.) What I thought was interesting was not the secret mojo that it no doubt contains if only we could just crack the code (I'll leave that to Dan Brown) but the discussion on carbon dating. They are able to date the paper but not the ink because ink isn't necessarily of organic origin. I had never thought about that before but it makes sense. They do not as yet have a reliable way to date the ink in any case and still rule out contamination from the paper materials. They can make a reasonable guess as to the age of the document however based on the paper as there is no trace residue of anything that would have cleaned previous writings off of the parchment. As paper used to be a high-priced item, this was a common practice.

It's quite pretty and has some...odd drawings in it. Here is a site with more information and images. Yale Library is its current custodian.

What I've looked up thus far for Bangkok 8

I'm loving this original mystery set in Bangkok. And bonus, I don't really know that much about Thailand. And I have to love a hero who falls apart and mourns his fallen partner and childhood friend by ostensibly investigating who might have stuffed that Mercedes full of drugged cobras and a python (no, really) but really by smoking dope, taking yaa baa (it's Thai meth, it literally means mad drug) and dancing with prostitutes. Original in a hero.

Yaa baa is apparently sometimes cut with caffeine because...the problem with meth is it just won't keep you awake?

Bangkok is really not the correct name of the city of course. It's Krung Thep to the locals. Bangkok was the original site chosen as the Thai capital but the King decided that a site across the river was better. The official name is officially the longest place name in the world. Translated, it roughly means this:

The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city (of Ayutthaya) of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.

Apparently, if you get far enough into rural Thailand, there are people who won't have any idea what Bangkok is. Clearly the musical Chess flopping is to blame here.

Here is a map of Thailand that notes both Krung Thep and Bangkok on it.

Sonchai also mentions visiting a teak house so I went to look up some examples. And there I learned the world's largest teak mansion is in Bangkok. Most of the world's teak, alas, currently comes from Myanmar.

At one point, Sonchai eats papaya pok pok which is a dish of chilis and papayas that even the Thais can find hot. Here is the recipe. I like spicy stuff as much as anyone but papaya in a melange of chili sounds like a recipe for the most miserable vomiting experience of your life.


Sonchai also visits an old farang (foreigner, usually white) boyfriend of his mother's at Bang Kwang Prison which is also known as the Bangkok Hilton. It's about 7 miles north of the city on the Chao Phraya River. There is a lot more about this prison on the BBC's site here and here. The locals have little to no choice but I wonder about the Westerners who end up here. Did they not catch Midnight Express?