Great lines from Olive Kitteridge

From "Incoming Tide":

When he got his medical degree from Chicago, attending the ceremony only because one of his teachers-a kind woman, who had said it would sadden her to have him not there-he sat beneath the full sun, listening to the president of the university say in his final words to them, "To love and be loved is the most important thing in life," causing Kevin to feel an inward fear that grew through him, as though his very soul were tightening. But what a thing to say--the man in his venerable robe, white hair, grandfatherly face--he must've had no idea those words could cause such an exacerbation of the silent dread in Kevin. Even Freud had said, "We must love or we grow ill." They were spelling it out for him.  Every billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad--it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of family and love. And you don't.

(I just now noticed that awkward repetition of "spell" there. The passage is so beautiful I missed it the first time.)

From "Basket of Trips" (Olive observing an act of affection from a girl toward her mother at the wake for her father's funeral):

And Olive, watching all this, feels--what? Jealousy? No, you don't feel jealous of a woman whose husband has been lost. But an unreachability, that's how she'd put it. This plump, kind-natured woman sitting on the couch surrounded by children, her cousin, friends--she is unreachable to Olive. Olive is aware of the disappointment this brings.

From "Security":

Stepping into the little closet of a bathroom, she flicked on the light, and saw in the mirror that across her blue cotton blouse was a long and prominent strip of sticky dark butterscotch sauce. A small feeling of distress took hold. They had seen this and not told her. She had become the old lady her Aunt Ora had been, when years ago she and Henry would take the old lady out for a drive, stopping some nights to get an ice cream, and Olive had watched as Aunt Ora had spilled melted ice cream down her front; she had felt repulsion at the sight of it. In fact, she was glad when Ora died, and Olive didn't have to continue to witness the pathetic sight. 

And now she had become Ora. But she wasn't Aunt Ora and her son should have pointed this out the minute it happened...Did they think she was just one more baby they were carting around? 

 
From "River" (the closing lines and the last story in the collection):

They were here, and her body-old, big, sagging-felt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes.

.......

And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn't have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union--what pieces life took out of you.

Her eyes were closed, and thought her tired self swept waves of gratitude and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

First and last for Mockingjay

Did not like as much as the first two.

First line:

I stare down at my shoes, watching as a fine layer of ash settles on the worn leather.

Last line:

But there are much worse games to play.

First and last for State of Wonder

First:

The news of Anders Eckman's death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope. Who even knew they still made such things?

Last:

She didn't see Karen open her door but there she was, flying into his arms, her feet never touching the lawn. She was as small and golden as a child herself. It was as if they had waited for him everyday he had been gone, holding their burning sticks above their heads, pouring their souls up to heaven in a single voice of ululation until he came back. And Marina brought him back, and without a thought that anyone should see her, she told the driver to go on.

What I've looked up thus far for State of Wonder

Marina mentions how she had horrible nightmares whenever she went to India as a child and didn't realize until she had to go to Brazil and start anti-malarials again, what was the cause. The drug Lariam. When I was on malaria meds (less exotic than this sounds), I took plain old chloroquine and if they had adverse affects I didn't notice them between the dysentery and general craziness of being in a foreign country.

Chloroquine is a 4-Aminoquinoline and for the most part, its side effects seem benign. Itchy skin, unpleasant taste in the mouth, headache. All pretty generic and if you are in a place where malaria is prevelent, you probably feel all of the above regardless. Along with an unceasing fear you are at any minute going to shit yourself.

Lariam, or Mefloquine, was created by the army in the 1970's. It's a synthetic form of quinine, the original Malaria remedy that comes from cinchona tree bark. According to Wiki, as of 2009 Roche no longer manufactures it but you can get generic analogs still.

Although, why the hell would you want to. Take a look at these side effects: psychosis, seizures, pneumonia and abnormal heartbeat. In fact in {the website in the link says 2008 but it appears this happened in 2002}, within 6 weeks time 4 soldiers at Fort Bragg murdered their wives. Two later killed themselves. Lariam was mentioned as a possible cause.

As to why the character was taking Lariam at all, I found this on a travel website:

Generally, chloroquine is not prescribed for areas where chloroquine-resistent malaria is thriving - mainly in tropical climates. In more temporate zones, such as Argentina, chloroquine is sufficient as most areas are of no risk.

There are other options but they have other side-effects, such as doxycycline which causes photo-sensitivity (and is an antibiotic. I'm surprised it's in this list.) 

Marina mentions she is going to Manaus. Manaus is the capital of the state of Amazonas, which is the largest state in Brazil. Look where this place is:

It's 2674 miles from Rio de Janeiro. It's 1200 miles from Brasilia. It's not a tiny backwater though. The population is 2 million. It looks very pretty , more than I expected, in pictures.

First and last for Boneshaker

But first a word on Spencer Rifles, like Briar used.

The Spencer was invented in 1860 for use by the Union Army. I'm not certain that it would therefore have made it into the hands of a Seattle lawman (Briar's father) by 1863 but it's alt history anyways so, of course it would. Unless you are a rifle buff perhaps (I'm not), there isn't anything that distinguishing in its looks:

It could fire 20 rounds a minute which made it a huge advantage for the Union in combat. The South did capture a few but lacked the raw materials to manufacture new cartridges.

And, here's a sequence I particularly liked between Angeline and Zeke on the death of possible deserter and tragic but rightfully doomed figure Rudy:

"We should do something," he said weakly.

"Like what? Like help him? Boy, he's so far beyond help that even if I wanted to, there's nothing to be done for him. Hell. The kindest thing we could do is shoot him in the head."

"Angeline!"

"Don't look at me like that. If he were a dog, you wouldn't let him suffer. Thing is, he ain't a dog, and I don't mind him suffering. You know what's in that bottle? The one that he's holding there, like it's his own baby?"

{it's a bottle of Blight made to be drinkable-not sure how it differs from the distilled Blight beer that is safe to drink}

....

"This miserable poison was bound to kill him one day, and I think today will be that day."

"We should help him," Zeke said, protesting the man's death as a matter of formality.

"You want to shoot him after all?"

"No!"

"Me either. I don't think he deserves it...Cover him up if you think that's polite."

Ok, first line:

She saw him and she stopped a few feet from the stairs.

Last line:

Hale Quarter jabbed a pen against his tongue to moisten it, and began to write.

First and last for The Hunger Games

Ok, it was mad entertaining and not something I'd feel horribly guilty about reading like Twilight (not that I've read it but I hear it has that affect on people and frankly, if I found myself loving that Mormon purity fable I'd have to re-evaluate my life.)

Also, check out:

http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/32461.html

A map of Panem rendered in obsessive geographic detail.

First:

When  I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.

Last:

I take his hand, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.

First and last for In the Miso Soup

I think I'll have to think about this book for a few days before I can decide what I think of it (or even if I liked it-which usually means I did but it's complicated. This book is like meeting a married man in a hotel room. Who might follow you home and tape human skin to your door.)

First, here is the section that gives the book it's title and is my favorite part:

"There's just one thing I was hoping we could do that we never got around to. I wanted to have some miso soup with you, bit it's too late now. We won't be meeting again."

"Miso soup?"

"Yeah. I'm really interested in miso soup. I ordered it at a little sushi bar in Colorado once long ago, and I thought it was a darned peculiar kind of soup, the smell it had and everything, so I didn't eat it, but it intrigued me. It had that funny brown color and smelled kind of like human sweat, but it also looked delicate and refined somehow. I came to this country hoping to find out what the people who eat that soup on a daily basis might be like. So I'm a little disappointed we didn't get to have some together."

I asked him if he was going back to America right away. No, not right away, he said, so I suggested we could still have miso soup together sometime.....

"I don't need to eat the stuff now because now I'm here-right in the middle of it! The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I'm in the miso soup myself, just like those bits of vegetable. I'm floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that's good enough for me."

I'd never say this to anyone who had never had miso but that's actually an excellent, indeed elegant, description. Smelling sort of like sweat but delicate.

Anyways, first and last.

First line:

My name is Kenji.

Last line:

"The feather of a swan," I said.

What I've learned from Vinyl Junkies thus far

I love Brett Milano's writing for starters. He has a new book about the music of Boston (sure Aerosmith comes to mind right away but Mission of Burma and Dresden Dolls-sure dark cabaret is kind of majorly over but still-didn't.) Here is his website.

This book is dangerous to read. I feel myself tipping on the precipice of collecting vinyl when they describe the gatefolds, the smell, the physical act of putting the needle on the record (which uh....I don't find Freudian, Brett.)

Here's his description from chapter one of the first vinyl recording that blew him away, Prokofiev's The Scythian Suite, listened to in a collector's home:

So now it's time to pull out the heavy artillery, as they prepare to give me the Scythian....but not just any copy. This is the 1957 recording by Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra on the Mercury label-one of the first stereo recordings ever issued. The legend "Mercury Living Presence" blazes proudly across the cover; the same design is still there on the current compact-disc edition. But we're looking to get close to the master tape and deep into the music, and the preferred path is that original 1957 pressing, made while the master tape was likely still throbbing. 

According to one collector:

"My trip is about using the music," he explains. "I don't believe in the idea of ownership-hey, we're all gonna die someday so you don't own that record, you just get to use it for a while. There is no joy in ownership, the joy comes when you play the record."

Of course, for some collectors, the joy really really is in ownership. If a mint record is played, it's no longer "mint" and the physical act of playing it can damage it-the big downside of vinyl. 

Record collecting itself has changed shape in recent decades. During the '70's, it was necessary for any serious music fan to be something of a collector, since so many important albums-by the likes of John Coltrane, the Velvet Underground, and even the Beach Boys-were either out of print or available in truncated, shoddily packaged or badly mastered editions (the Beach Boys albums with songs taken off them, or the first Velvets with the banana skin permanently pressed on, rank with the dregs of the era.)

--------

"A record is that object that you can hold and watch and learn from," notes Miriam Linna, who's made a few of those objects herself....."Look at the label, it's got all that information that somebody wanted to give you. There's the names of the people who wrote the song, the names of who published it, and maybe where the record comes from-if you don't find that one, it's just another mystery to solve."

----

From Roger Manning, formerly of the band Jellyfish:

"What really got me was the smell of the records I grew up with-maybe it was the pressing plant they used, for some reason records on the Casablanca label had a smell that blew our minds-when you smell that, it brings you right back to childhood. So we wanted to find a way to make our records smell that way, but of course nobody at our label knew what the hell we were talking about." 

I haven't thought of this in many years but I can remember sniffing the 45 of "I was Made for Loving You" and thinking it smelled intriguing and that's not a Kiss does disco joke.

Here's the sciencey part, from a guy who's the director of the Washington Psychiatric Center:

The need to collect stems from a serotonin deficiency. Serotonin is the enzyme that controls worries; with too little of the former you get too much of the latter. "It's a form of addiction, if you want to call it that. The current thinking in neuroscience is that people with serotonin deficiencies are much more driven to compulsions, including the compulsion to collect. Various life events may disturb you and prompt that compulsion."

Some random quotes I've liked recently

Emphasis on the random, as we shall see...

BBC Open Book had a show discussing the short story and why it gets short shrift from British publishers. Tessa Hadley (a British author and literary essayist) was discussing her love for Alice Munro and how her stories don't have a proper ending. Hadley said how dare anyone have the audacity to expect Munro to provide an ending for such real lives. Other thoughts about short stories were that they were more nutritious than novels (packed with more stuff per page) and that the writer had to hook the reader in the first few sentences as readers were more likely to put a short story that didn't grab them then a novel.

180 degrees later, Onion AV was discussing the ever-declining ratings of "Jersey Shore", a show I've still never seen except for clips on "The Soup" and "Beavis and Butthead" (Butthead, "Grandma J-Wow, tell us when you first got chlamydia.") They describe the cast as "seven sentient bottles of vodka-scented tanning oil," a line that's pretty much going to be impossible not to store away for future use.

What I've looked up thus far for The Dead Hour

Just a mystery series based in Scotland so not a lot to look up, although I am a big Denise Mina fan girl so that's not a slight.

Still, a little geography never hurt anyone.

It was hard to find a map of Glasgow that wasn't too busy. Here's a fairly good one:

The Clyde River of course runs through the city of Glasgow. It's the third largest river in Scotland and the ninth longest river in the UK and too far down on either of those lists to probably ever come up as a trivia question.

From all of the maps, it looks like Glasgow is mostly on the north side of the river. I know some of the poorer areas (like the Gorbals, which is semi-infamous) are south of the river. Here is a whole website dedicated to educating tourists about sights to see south of the Clyde.

Paddy mentions going to St. Columbkille's Church with her mother. I wasn't familiar with this saint but evidently he's a big deal in Scotland and Ireland. According to an eponymous US church, he is one of the great saints of Ireland and the first missionary to Scotland. His name is Gaelic for "dove of the church."

First and last for The Moviegoer

Sigh, for the sake of completeness recording first and last for this book that I was semi-indifferent to. Loved the prose and Percy's descriptive powers. Not so much into anything else. Unable to pick up on Catholic folderol and thus was happily unable to be annoyed by it.

First:

This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch.

Last:

I watch her walk toward St. Charles, cape jasmine held against her cheek, until my brothers and sisters call out behind me.

Ok, the lovely prose it not so much evinced by the passages above but my malaise is such that I cannot continue.

(malaise reference would make sense if you're read this. If you haven't, don't bother.)

First and last for Winter's Bone

First:

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat.

Last:

"Wheels."

Great lines from Winter's Bone

It's been a while since I've read anything properly literary. Or maybe I'm too lazy to record it. Anyways. Daniel Woodrell. Great writer. I really want to see this movie now. The great John Hawkes plays Uncle Teardrop.

I remember visiting the Bahamas when I was in high school and meeting a boy who was the son of an embassy employee and he told me he'd never seen snow. If I had to explain snow to someone again, I think I'd give them this book.

She smelled the frosty wet in the looming clouds, and thought of her shadowed kitchen and lean cupboard, looked to the scant woodpile, shuddered. The coming weather meant wash hung outside would freeze into planks, so she'd have to stretch clothesline across the kitchen above the woodstove, and the puny stack of wood split for the potbelly would not last long enough to dry much...Ree knew there was no gas for the chain saw, so she'd be swinging the ax out back while winter bleww into the valley and fell around her....Jessup, her father, had not set by a fat woodpile nor split what there was for the potbelly...Walnuts were still falling when Ree saw him last. Walnuts were thumping to the ground in the night like stalking footsteps of some large thing that never quite came into view.

Snow covered the tracks and made humps over the rails and the twin humps guided her. She broke her own trail through the snow and booted the mile from her path. The morning sky was gray and crouching, the wind had snap and drew water to her eyes...The world seemed huddled and hushed and her crunching steps cracked loud as ax whacks.

While looking for her father at her crank-cooking Uncle Teardrop's house, Ree contemplates her future:
Ree felt bogged and forlorn, doomed to a spreading swamp of hateful obligations. There would be no ready fix or answer or help. She felt like crying but wouldn't. She could be beat with a garden rake and never cry and had proved that twice before Mamaw saw an unsmiling angel pointing from the treetops at dusk and quit the bottle.

Uncle Teardrop is so named, btw, because of a prison tattoo of teardrops on his face. Everyone in this book has great names. My favorite other than Ree Dolly is Catfish Milton.

One of Ree's relatives, Blond Milton (see? The names are classic), tries to convince Ree that her Dad died in a meth lab mishap. Her reaction:

"You son of a bitch. You go straight to hell'n fry in your own lard. Sonny'n Harold'll die living in a fuckin cave with me'n Mom before they'll ever spend a single fuckin night with you. Goddam you, Blond Milton, you must think I'm a stupid idiot or somethin-there's horseweed standing chin-high inside that place."

Ree keeps looking. Things get bad. She gets the shit beat out of her, literally, by some hillbilly crank cooks (not that getting beaten by Walter or Gus-RIP-would be an improvement) until Teardrop rescues her and explains the hullabaloo about her dad, Jessup, in this soliloquy of Shakespearean import:

"You got to be ready to die every day-then you got a chance...You do big wrong'n it's me that'll pay big. Jessup, he went'n did wrong, the poor silly shit. Jessup went'n turned snitch, and that's only the biggest ancient no-no of all, ain't it? I never thought, but he couldn't face this last bust, couldn't face a ten-year jolt. Plus there's your mom, sittin' home crazy forever. That was heavy on his mind. Them boys. You. He started talkin to that fuckin' Baskin-but I want you to know, Jessup, Jessup wasn't givin' up no Rathlin Valley men. Huh-uh, huh-uh. He said he wasn't. Wouldn't do it. He said, shit, he said all kinds of...If I could do any of my days over, girl, that very first asshole I killed'd still be walking around. But, hell, never been found and I'm...You're forcing me out into the open, girl. Understand? You're puttin' me into the exact picture I been tryin' to dodge. They been waitin' to see if I'll do anything. Watchin'. Listen...the way it is....the way I feel..is, I can't know who killed Jessup. I can suspicion a man or two, have a hinky feelin', but I can't know for a certain fact who went and killed my little brother. Even if he did wrong, which he did, why. ..it'll eat at me if I know who they sent. Eat at me like red ants. Then...there'll come a night...a night when I have that one more snort I didn't need, and I'll show up somewhere'n see whichever fucker done it sippin' a berr'n hootin' at a joke and...shit..that'll be that. They'll all come for me then. Buster Leroy, Little Arthur, Cotton Milton, Whoop Milton, Dog, Punch, Hog-jaw, that droopy-eyed motherfucker Sleepy John. But, anyhow, girl, I'll help you some, take your back so you can find his bones, but the deal is, even if you find out, you can't ever let me know who did the actual killin' of my brother. Knowin' that'd just mean I'll be toes-up myself purty soon, too. Deal?"

Another late night ride with Teardrop to look for her Dad's bones and he gets mad at a guy at a bar for the way he talked and returns to the truck where Ree is sitting there sick, post beating with a probably concussion and highly medicated:

"I just don't like the say he said somethin'...{gets an axe from his truck, goes over and meticulously smashes the entire front windshield of the offender's car, puts the axe away and sits in the cab thinking}...Sassy. Sort of sassy-soundin'."


Things keep happening, including a near shoot-out between Sheriff Baskin and Teardrop. At any rate, Jessup is indeed dead and the women who beat her eventually take Ree to show her the body and cut off the hands with a chain saw (!) to prove to the law that he's dead so the family won't lose the house, they don't and the bondsman shows up to give Ree the money someone (Jessup's killer) paid to make up the difference on Jessup's bond. It's a huge sack of cash.

She stood on the porch watching him drive away, then turned to Teardrop. The color of him had changed, paled everywhere but his scar. She said, "What? What's the matter?"

"I know who now."

"Huh?"

"Jessup. I know who."

Without hesitation or thought, she sprang to him, spread her arms and held him tightly, the roiling blood and spirit of her own. She felt she was holding somebody doomed who was already vanishing even as she squeezed her arms around his neck. The shadows had the creek, the valley, the yard, the house. The shadows were over them and she wept, wept against her uncle's chest. She wept, snuffled, wept, and he hugged her, hugged her til her backbone creaked, then broke away. He went down the steps three at a time, hustled to his truck without a backward glance, and was gone.

What I learned from the Hugo book

Damn it, I loved the Hugo flick. I want to go see it again after reading the book, probably by myself so I'll feel free enough to sit and cry because, damn it, Georges Melies deserves recognition, man and I'm so glad he's getting it plus that damn automaton storylne, watching Melies destroy his film props and the little orphan kid just slay me.

So, a few random things I learned from Selznick's companion book:

• Martin Scorsese actually remembers the first movie he ever saw, David O. Selznick produced Duel in the Sun. This caused me to think hard on the first movie I saw and....I have no idea. The first one I remember seeing in the theatre was a Bruce Lee flick. I'm pretty sure I made it about 20 minutes before being bored stiff and demanding to leave. In my defense, I was 4 so this was pretty much the inevitable outcome.
• Speaking of Selznick, yes, he is related to the author.
• To create the dust in the train station, the cinematographer Robert Richardson used shredded goose down and blew it around with fans.
• Melies did really own several automatons. They were popular with magicians (which Melies was) around the turn of the century. Just like in the movie, he donated them to a museum where they were stored in the attic and destroyed by water damage which is too painful to contemplate very much.
• Melies' family owned a shoe factory which he sold to buy a theatre from another magician named Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin. Yes, the name isn't a coincidence. The Hungarian magician Ehrich Weiss was inspired after seeing him to change his name to Houdini.
• Houdin owned an automaton named Antonio Diavolo that performed a trapeze act. I'm not sure if the original version still exists. Here is a reproduction:

•  In 1739, the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson invented an automaton duck that could flap its wings, eat and apparently shit. Which probably would have been cool to see until you realized there is quite enough bird shit in the world already, particularly if you work in an office park with a pond.
• Around 1800, the Swiss mechanic Henri Maillardet created some automatons that wrote and drew pictures, just like in the film. You can see video of one of his automatons here.

Lawrence Krauss on Science Friday

When we contemplate jobs worse than ours, one that doesn't often come up but has to be bad is call screener for a radio or (less common these days) television show. Howard Stern alone probably nearly killed this career. I had jobs in my youth that involved answering the phones at businesses and it's stressful being the gatekeeper for every shut-in, teenager and pervert (or some unholy combination of the above) with a telephone, even when you aren't on the public airwaves. If you don't believe me, try working third shift at a hotel.

Despite my sympathy for folks so employed, the screeners on Science Friday seem either particularly gullible or the show is just target for a lot of wackos who can't locate "Coast to Coast" on their dials. You can guarantee some religious wack job will call in almost every time they open the phone lines, as will someone who questions "What good does this do?" to anyone who isn't literally curing cancer or whatever they feel is morally acceptable for all scientific types should be working on.

Lawrence Krauss was on recently plugging his new book, A Universe From Nothing, and was discussing among other things dark energy (to review: the universe is growing colder and farther apart infinity or as the late Christopher Hitchens put it, hurrying towards nothing.) One deep thinker called in to say, "I think dark energy should be called 'God's glue.' " That's great, man. I think traffic roundabouts should be called "monkey circle droppings" and that 2 Broke Girls should be called "lame vagina joke cesspool." Also, I don't like grapes with brown spots on them. Thanks for letting me share these equally relevant observations.


At any rate, Krauss had a brilliant response that I wish I could recreate verbatim which essentially boiled down to isn't that the great thing about science is that, unlike religion, scientists don't mind and in fact enjoy having their beliefs challenged. That they don't require their world to be unshakable no matter what things are called. 

And the "What's the point, blah blah cancer" guy called in too, of course. WTF is happening, Science Friday? Do you want those calls? Are not enough real questions coming in? Is this like some pledge drive torture device?

Anyways, I think I'll add Krauss's book to my queue. And probably never read it but it'll make me look smart. Or, smarter.

First and last for In the Cut

The last is already in the last post but anyways--

First:

I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony.

Last:



She knows the poem.

Great lines from In the Cut

Read almost as a joke but the joke's on me as I dug this book. Even if the end fucked me up a bit.


The introduction to our protagonist, a linguaphile and NYU (? presumably) professor who is also nameless, which I'm sure is on purpose but I'm not sure what it means. Here she discusses her class:

But irony terrifies them. To begin with, they don't understand it. It's not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don't. I am reduced to giving examples, like the baby who is saved from death only to be hit by a bus on the way home. That helps a little. Cornelius said that he preferred realism to irony because irony turned conceived wisdom on its head. Whether he meant to say conventional wisdom or received wisdom, I don't know. I was so distracted by an image of wisdom being turned on its head that I simply nodded and let him go on. Irony is like ranking someone or something, he said, but no one knows for sure you're doing it. 

On getting home and finding Detective Malloy's card in her mailbox and why she doesn't plan on calling him:

I used to keep a shopping bag full of the things that had been left on the stoop or pushed into my mailbox until the bag finally ripped at the sides. It had in it, among other things, a demo cassette of an elderly Welsh poet reciting eighteenth-century Cockney rhymes; a nude barbie doll bound and gagged that my landlord brought upstairs to give to me-it had been on the Greek Revival doorstep all afternoon, he said warily, was it mine?-and a box of condoms, each one engraved or, more accurately, embossed with my name, the letter i dotted with a heart, a gift which I knew was meant for me, which I could not with absolute certainty say about the other gifts, and which I assumed had been left by someone I'd once dated.


So, needless to say, I threw Detective Malloy's card away.

I admire the economy of words in the book, how much Moore is able to get across about the protagonist while saying so little. This is one of the few times she mentions her mother yet it tells you volumes:

He looked at the jade hairpins again, each a different shape. They had belonged to a Chinese maid in my grandmother's house in San Francicso, whom I think of tenderly as the only person, as far as I know, that my mother ever loved. 

Alas, the hairpins will later be stolen by her student Cornelius following a failed, awkward sexual encounter. 

On her first encounter with Malloy:

He sighed in dismissal and stood up, the chair swaying beneath him. "My ex-wife collects dolls," he said. He put the hairpins back on the table, lining them up absentmindedly, and I suddenly wondered if he was neat. I imagined that he, too, had a collection of dolls. Lined up neatly.

The poetry on the subway is a running theme. This line will turn up later, significantly:

I noticed that the Poetry in Motion poem was new. An excerpt from "The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage." Walter Raleigh. "Give me my Scallop shell of quiet."

BTW, the poem's text is here (and I'm sure, many places.) It was written around 1603. The first stanza goes:

GIVE me my scallop-shell of quiet,
    My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
    My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage ;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

It sounded better out of context. 

I love this scene where she leaves Pauline's apartment to find her student Cornelius waiting for her outside which manages to be funny and disturbing, like many parts of the book:

"Well," I said slowly, "I think that there is. Something wrong with that."

"I got words for you and shit."

I did not necessarily disbelieve him, but I still did not think it a good idea that he had followed me. And waited for me. Three hours. To give me words.

"You might not want them 'cause they be words for--you know," he said slyly.

"What?" I asked.

"You know."

"I don't know. What are you talking about?"

"Words for that. What you calls sex."

 I wanted to ask him what he called it.

More Subway poetry and creeping dread:

As I walked home, I thought about the new poem in the Number Four subway. I have become so paranoid in the last month that I believe that the Poetry in Motion placards are messages for me. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally selected for me by someone who has managed to gain influence over the Transit Authority Selection Committee. The new poem is a haiku by Yosano Akiko. "Come at last to this point/I look back on my passion/And realize that I/have been like a blind man/Who is unafraid of the dark." For me, right?

.......

I'm getting better. I don't assume that every man with a moustache, wearing a suit, is a detective. I do not think the new poem in the subway is meant for me. It is a Seneca Indian song. "It's off in the distance. It came into the room." Clearly not for me.

After finding Pauline, so revealing in the way your mind reconfigures itself after a tragedy:

I was so ashamed by the things that used to make me unhappy. That I was upset because he lied to me about his wife and then went on vacation with her. That Yale University won't give me permission to use the letters of C.K. Whitney. That my father forgot me in Geneva.

And the ending which shocked me, partly because I'd seen the shitty movie and partly because, damn. Spoilers if anyone is actually reading and cares:

My face. My throat. My breasts. My breastesses. Malloy would know when he saw my hands. My arms. he would know. How I fought.

He lifted himself from me. I heard him unlock the door. For a moment, I felt the cool air from the river, smelling of fish. Smelling of Eve [reference to the old, unfunny joke Rodriguez told her a page ago about God never getting the smell out of the fish.] It made me shudder. I was cold.

There is an essay on the language of the dying. The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way. I said: I am bleeding. I am going to bleed to death. And I will be lucky if I die before he returns.

Give me my Scallop shell of quiet.

You know, they did not print the whole of the Indian song in the subway. Only a few lines. But I know the poem.

"It's off in the distance. It came into the room. It's here in the circle."

I know the poem.

She knows the poem.

 

I also loved the McGuffin with the rubber hand someone left below her mailbox. The killer takes souvenirs. She (and the reader) think, hands? It's a message? Nope, he takes something else, something worse. What did the hand mean, then? Dunno but sufficiently diverting and disquieting.

In the Cut research

So, In the Cut. While the movie is doltish and embarrassing to watch (for all the wrong reasons), the book is kind of good.

Some random things I looked up--

The narrator-do they ever mention her name?-mentions that Pauline is wearing a Japanese Happi coat. They are traditionally worn only for festivals in Japan, however you can buy them online (beware, the website has an annoying midi file) for wearing anytime and I admit, I kinda want one. Here's a sample image:

Good excuse to learn some NYC geography. The narrator lives on Washington Square Park. This puts her in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, near NYU. Although Moore makes the area sound seedy, the Wiki article says the crime rate is very low (although maybe someone from the Mayor's office writes for Wikipedia.) Does this mean no bars with 13 year olds with fake id's? (one of the credulity straining parts of the book. Surely no bar in a major American city is that brazen.)

Our nameless narrator mentions that the tenor of the neighborhood grows more boho below 14th street. Here is one of the better maps I found from a cursory search:

There's also a good Manhattan neighborhood map here.

Maybe I need to look through seedier listings but out of curiosity, I searched apartments in the Village and the cheapest I found (a studio) was $1695 a month.

Some basic Manhattan geography: the Hudson River and New Jersey are to the west. The East River, Queens and Brooklyn are to the east. Brooklyn is to the southeast and Staten Island is due south. It's the most densely populated of NYC's five boroughs although the borough with the largest population is Brooklyn, with Queens a close second. Only Manhattan is in New York County (actually each borough is in its own county.) When New Yorkers speak of going to the city, they generally mean going to Manhattan.

From Greenwich Village, you can take the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River to scenic Jersey City. One of the many routes into the island that earns commuters the moniker "Bridge and Tunnel people."

Finalt thoughts and First/Last for The Winter Queen

I still want to look up the order of St. Valdimir and the crisis in the Balkans they referred to (the year is 1876.)

This is kind of a schizophrenic book. A cozy mystery with a typically complicated plot (tricking someone into suicide, pretending to be a ghost, a vast worldwide orphan conspiracy) that with few modifications could be Steampunk. But then there's that surprising turn at the end that reminds you, hey a Russian did write this. Poor Erast. Poor Lizanka's arm-nevermind the rest of her. I'll probably read more of this eventually although really, I'm kind of wanting to boo and throw tomatoes at that last chapter. I'm curious to see where the series goes from here and what happens to Erast. I'm guessing the tone of the next novel must be different.

First:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon on a day that combined the freshness of spring with the warmth of summer, numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens unexpectedly found themselves eyewitnesses to the perpetration of an outrage that flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.

Last:

No, the attention of those he encountered, especially the ladies, was attracted by one particularly intriguing feature of his appearance: despite his obvious youth the bon vivant's temples were a stark white, as if they were thickly coated with hoarfrost.

what I've looked up thus far for The Winter Queen

I love how this book opens:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon...numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens...

Poetic, no. But perfect in its geo/temporal data. It's Moscow, 1876. The rule of Romanov Tsar Alexander II (he would be assassinated in 1881 after decades of various attempts on his life. He was famous for freeing the serfs but was a bastard to Poland and the Baltic States. However, he encouraged Finnish autonomy and language so they like him there. The poor son of a bitch died after escaping a bombing attempt on his carriage. A second bomber threw a bomb at his feet. There was a third bomber waiting in the crowd. They really wanted him dead, in little pieces.) He was followed by only two more Tsars: Alexander III and then Nicholas II.

The book opens at any rate with a suspicious suicide in the Alexander Gardens in Moscow. This was one of Moscow's first public parks. It was built from 1819-1823 in commemoration of the defeat of Napoleon at the request (or, probably I should say "request") of Alexander I, the uncle of the ill-fated Alexander II. The Gardens are adjacent to Red Square and the western wall of the Kremlin.

Here is the gate that commemorates victory in the Napoleonic Wars:

It was built on the site of a the former riverbed of the Neglinnaya River (the flow was diverted underground.)

Enjoy this Wikimap of the layout.

The book references a "Table of Ranks" at the back to show the standing of the protagonist, Collegiate Registrar Erast Fandorin, rank 14, as compared with others. It's a convoluted system established by Peter the Great in 1722. Among other things, it correlates military ranks with the civilian equivalents.

Many streets in Moscow are mentioned so, once again, I would have liked a map to be available. Fandorin travels up Mokhovaya Street a number of times. Here is what it would have looked like then:

It literally means "Moss Street" and was named for a market. It is still a major thoroughfare in Moscow. It's part of the ring road that circles the Kremlin area.

I believe the university he mentions visiting is Moscow State, purported to be the oldest university in Russia. Here is what it would have looked like about a century before:

I think the "yellow building" that Fandorin goes to is what is now called, factually, the Old Building. It was built in 1783. Here's what it looks like now:

Old, yellow. Those Russians get right to the point. Today, the journalism faculty and Oriental studies are located there.

Interestingly, after the October Revolution in 1917, anyone could be admitted (well, technically) and tuition fees were abolished in 1919. Now all you had to do was avoid studying or teaching the wrong thing and being sent to Vorkuta.

This site has an archive of historical maps. Here is one of 19th century Moskva.

Near the end, the book mentions there is trouble in the Balkans that is distracting the leadership. I think they are referring to the Balkan/Turkish crisis. The Balkans, including Greece, were under Ottoman rule at the time. The Slavs all hated each other but they hated the Turks more so they banded together in the Bulgarian Uprising in April of 1876 where Turkish troops killed up to 15,000 people (it's controversial-apparently the troops weren't regular Turkish army.) It was nasty business at any rate-people taking refuge in churches and being burned alive- and things snowball, the world gets wind of the Bulgarian massacre, the Russians are still pissed about the Crimean War, Slav nationalism flares up and by June Serbia and Montenegro have declared war on the Turks.

The Russians proposed a peace agreement in 1877 called the London Convention (Austria-Hungary are involved too) but the Turks rejected it. Now the Russians declare war. The bottom line is the Turks, being neither the first nor last to do so, severely underestimate the Russians and finally in 1878 peace is declared with some intervention from the British as the fear of Pan-Slavic fervor spreads through the rest of Europe. At the Congress of Berlin, the Balkans get re-diced with Bulgaria split into 3 pieces and Austria granted the right to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. All of this pisses Russia off because they want the Balkans for themselves. A Second Balkan Crisis will follow in 1885 and, of course, there will be more.

Incidentally, this conflict also led to the Red Cross/Red Crescent split which continues today.

At the end of the book, before everything goes to hell for Erast, he is awarded the order of St. Vladimir. Naturally, there is a website dedicated to Russian medals. Here is an example of what it looked like:

It was awarded for life-saving acts or famine relief (it was also awarded for military valor during the Crimean War.) There are different degrees of the order which can be seen in the Wikipedia article.