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.