Weathering change

Someone needed to get out so out we went. One of the good things about where I live, even though it is well within the city, is that just two blocks away I can descend into a ravine that is deep enough to block out all the traffic noise and give the illusion of being out in the country.

For the first part of the walk and despite there being no sun in the sky, the snow was blinding. It was odd because it was an all over oppression rather than a sense of light coming from anywhere specific. I was slightly worried that the fabled snow blindness might come on if this kept up but after about ten minutes my eyes adjusted. Then a wind came up. It felt a little cold until we got into the valley and then it was peaceful, fairly calm and then just us and the odd dog and walker.

The snow was really quite beautiful and the walk invigorating as always. What was disturbing is that this is almost May and look at the snow:

or

The thing is this. One week ago we were at twenty degrees above zero (centigrade) and there wasn’t a speck of snow to be found. Proof below.

Starting a new blog

Hey folks, for those of you who care, and few though you may be, I thought it worth a notice. I have decided to launch a new blog, one about the structures in my “fair” city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I am still crafting my monumental introductory post but the essence is this: all cities are composed of good and bad buildings and not too much is said about these things that we must pass by every day. My city is more bad than good, and the certainty of that comes from travel, from seeing alternative and much more interesting and pleasing solutions to that basic need of putting a roof over your head. But though I live in dross for the most part, I will try to laud as much as brickbat; I will do my best to praise what I can. And partly because I would like to see more of it.

Though much of it will be based on my pedestrian photographs of local sites, I will go afield as well partly so I can compare, and just to keep the blog a little varied. I will be asking for people to send in photos of buildings they love or hate, and I hope we get some provocative discussion going..after all we have to live with this stuff, might as well think about it too. And if someone sends me an image of a cool or not so cool building in Kuala Lumpor or Portland or Naiorobi, we’ll play with that.

Anyway, once its on its way, I will let you know, and though I will try to do a daily or bi-daily post, I do work full time so its not a promise, and I have to keep this one (and a couple of others) going as well.

BookPage: Book Bibliography: Articles

All the articles about books and/or authors and/or writing:

All My Friends are Superheroes
Appreciating appreciation

Bayard, he blows, or further notes on an academic buccaneer
Bayard: Just when you thought it was safe to read again
Ben Marcus in Harpers
Best books of 2007: 9 lists
Book of Lost Things
Books, happiness, learning Spanish and bad haircuts
Books, reading, memory and worth
Bunch o stuff

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Don’t like books

End of Mr. Y

Fantasy fiction for those who don’t generally swing that way
Finding a good opening
Fonts, voices and flipping to the good stuff

Gender and reading
Great line from a nonexistent book

Hard boiled wonderland

In my newspaper this morning
In offence of writing
Irish crime novels

Letters from Chuck
Literary high wire acts
Literary high wire acts 2
Literary high wire acts 3

Magical realism: The bridge from childhood
Making the cut
Mark Helprin: Character description
Marketing novels
Mirrormask
My culture ravaged: My culture was ravaged

Ottawa thoughts

Peter Robinson: Friend of the Devil
Picture is worth a thousand words
Pierre Bayard: Reading between the lines
Popular books I found unreadable

Reading past the disappointment

Starting out
Suffering witches and arabian nightmares

Terry Pratchett
There’s a killer on the road, his mind is squirming like a toad
Thomas Berger: Author Rex

Unmusical Russian, bloody carpenter

Wednesday smatterings
Westerns worth a read
Window Across the River
Wish I’d written this one
Without a net 3 or 3s a crowd

You were so poor? We were so poor that…

Irish Crime Novels

Some time ago I ran off a short note regarding the superlative Color of Blood by Declan Hughes and flippantly suggested “potato noir” as a term for Irish crime fiction. This was noticed and commented on by Declan Burke over at Crime Always Pays, and following the links I discovered not only his blog, the intriguing sound of his novel still unavailable in North America, and a heady discussion of mostly Irish mysteries and thrillers with some forays afield as well. And it is Declan I must thank for alerting me to Philip Davison’s Crooked Man and Gene Kerrigan’s The Midnight Choir.

I must say that after reading these two, and on contemplating the fierce wealth of stories from that quarter, that thank christ I am not an Irish mystery writer. The talents there are enough to strike terror into the heart of any budding scribe of even modest ambitions. I suppose I should not be surprised that the country so known for writing in general should also be successful in this genre too. After all I already find Flann O’Brian at the top of my list, as well as liking Joyce (not the two great last works so much but the earlier stuff), Samuel Beckett’s novels, John Banville’s Shroud (but I do not like his Benjamin Blacks at all), and Colum McCann’s short stories and Ken Bruen. And now these.

Philip Davison’s Harry Fielding is an uncommonly pragmatic sort, an MI5 freelancer, who for the most part has little difficulty looking the other way. His minder is a right bastard, and the sweepings under the carpet are forming unsightly mountains the size of which even our suffering but stalwart operative finds near impossible to ignore.

Fielding is not quite as nasty as let’s say Michael Caine’s Carter but give him a couple of years and if he’s still breathing he’ll get there. He’s the sort of man who witnesses a woman beating a man insensible, stuffing him in a trunk, driving him into a clearing in the woods, dragging him out of the trunk, driving back and forth over him a few times, then burying him, and then shows up at her door a few hours later with a bottle of whiskey and the assumption of a woman in need of company.

And though he is a tough, he’s not quite as tough as those who lean on him, and he does have friends of a sort who get hurt by association.

I’ll be looking for more from this man. He’s not what you’d call a fancy writer; he’s plain and straight and its what best suits this narrative.

Midnight Choir (named for the Leonard Cohen song) is a police procedural. Detective Inspector Harry Synott is a good cop, too good, good in the way that other cops hate him. He doesn’t like graft and he’s informed on his fellows. Though this begins as the beleagured but gifted detective making his way through cases, it all comes apart in the worst way possible.

This one’s a bit more of an extended novel than the Davison, dense in comparison, dense in characters and crimes and plot.

The question foremost on my mind now is, are there bad Irish crime novels? Perhaps the ocean is a fairly effective filter to a literature no better than any other but somehow I doubt it. Most national literatures I have dipped into have eventually given forth more than a few frogs but so far Ireland seems mostly princes.

Literary High Wire Acts 3

James Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand.

Prose is not the same as jazz but if it was, this might be what its like. Ellroy is all about rhythm and punch; you can hear the beat and it never stops. It takes you like music more than most fiction, a particular song, working the set of keys, opening some place new.

It opens with:

(Dallas, 11/22/63)

They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn’t sure he could do it. The Casino Operator’s Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.

Nobody said it.

Kill that coon. Do it good. Take our hit fee.

The flight ran smooth. A stew served drinks. She saw his gun. She played up. She asked dumb questions.

He said he worked Vegas PD. He ran the intell squad. He build files and loggged information.

She loved it. She swooned.

“Hon, what you doin’ in Dallas?”

He told her.

A Negro shivved a twenty-one dealer. The dealer lost an eye. The Negro booked to Big D. She loved it. She bought him highballs. He omitted details.

The dealer provoked the attack. The council issued the contract - death for ADW Two.

The preflight prep talk. Lieutnant Buddy Fritsch:

“I don’t have to tell you what we expect, son. And I don’t have to add that your father expects it, too.”

The stew played geisha girl. The stew fluffed her beehive.

And so it goes for over 700 pages, some sort of bastard cousin to hard boiled Hemingway crossed with bebop. Its all about the Kennedy assassination as an American plot, all dirty deals and dirty men, no morals and a lot of death, and its still music to read.

I don’t think there is anything around quite like this. There are quite a few writers with discernible patterns but this is in another league altogether.

Literary High Wire Acts 2

I remember reading one of Oliver Sacks‘ books about the curious things the mind can do, and often these bits of strange would be visual disturbances such as suddenly reverting to black and white vision, or having the whole break into parts, but the oddest of all, was the story of a man who was blind but didn’t think he was. I just could not imagine how that could be, how someone could keep that fiction going with all the evidence to the contrary. But Rupert Thompson took that condition and made it work.

Rupert Thompson’s The Insult.

James Hynes, one of my favourite authors has a fairly comprensive look at the novels of Thompson. He doesn’t seem to like this one quite as much as I did. And it is quite possible that I was so enthralled with finding the solution to an old question that I wasn’t as attentive to what else was going on. Nonetheless, it is one of those works that I could not have imagined if I had not read it.

As far as these experiments go, this is a success. Many people like to talk about Georges Perec’s A Void, the mystery written in French without ever using the letter e, and then translated into English also without the e. Its clever, and remarkable but as a mystery it fails; it is just not that good a book. I think that Life: A User’s Manual is genius. Its really a compendium of stories, one after the other within the context of the lives of the tenants of an apartment building.

Yet, and though the brilliance of Life caused me to read everything else by him that I could get my hands on, none matched it. Too many were tricks of the light; he belonged to a writing group that would set each other ludicrous challenges such as the writing without using a particular vowel, hence A Void.

One of the stories I liked the most in the book was where a man plans out the next few decades of his life. He studies watercolours for a year, then randomly travels the world with his servant for a year, at each place painting one watercolour which his servant packs up and ships back to someone who makes intricate jigsaw puzzles out of them, but just as he returns, looking forward to the puzzles, he goes blind.

Next James Ellroy and Dan Simmons

Literary High Wire Acts

Sometimes you run across a book that seems to do the impossible, that seems to either describe or explain a state of mind that you hadn’t till then quite understood, or that uses language in a unique yet accessible manner, or brings together disparate elements in a way that doesn’t appear to break the rules even though it really should.

1. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

Above is the hotter newer cover and below the one I encountered, the Picador cover which matched the other Hobans I had already run across (my once a year reread Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, and Turtle Diary). I have little memory of Kleinzeit but Turtle Diary has one of my favourite lines of all time where a person is rebuffing an acquaintance who wants to take the relationship to a more intimate level by maintaining that “a friendly presence scarcely known can be a wonderful thing”.

Mr. Hoban’s writing space from a Guardian series on author’s rooms:

Kind of a much cleaner version of Bacon’s studio.

Some time after reading this book I was able to use it for a psycholinguistics paper. The book is written in a postapocalyptic English, the sort of English that might be spoken a thousand years from now after civilization is still crawling back after near the end of the world. What’s really interesting is that though you have trouble reading the first little while, in a chapter or two it becomes quite easy, and eventually as transparent as regular language; you read without noticing any differences at all. And looking at it now for the first time in years, I see an interesting parallel with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

There come a man and a woman and a chyld out of a berning town they sheltert in the woodlings and foraging the bes they cud. Starveling wer what they wer doing. Dint haveno weapons nor dint know how to make a snare nor nothing. Snow on the groun and a grey sky overing and the black trees running ther branches in the wind. Crows calling 1 to a nother waiting for the 3 of them to drop. The man the woman and the chyld digging thru the snow they wer eating maws and dead leaves which they vomitit them up agen. Freezing col they wer nor dint have nothing to make a fire with to get warm. Starveling they wer and near come to the end of ther strength.

From a linguistic or language processing vantage this is quite intriguing because it ilustrates the malleability and adaptability of our processor or parser. We already know that having somewhat fuzzy filters allows us to decipher the speech of the drunk, the sleepy, the impedimented not to mention just all the differences that come with gender, age and cultural variation. And we know that people vary in how adaptable they are to the speech of others. Its not a yes or no proposition like sight.

With Riddley, we are first of all at sea with the new words and unusual constructions, messed up grammar and all but our remarkable general problem solver goes to work, and because the new pattern is both closely related to what we already know, and because it is quite consistent, we shift in such a way as to match the new flow.

The other example from writing that I used in the paper was Louisiana cook Justin Wilson’s cajun patter. I was particularly caught by his going against what I thought was a fairly concrete rule when he said “eight or seven things” or “three or two crawfish” -always the higher number coming first.

The Riddley cover in my collection.

Still to come: Rupert Thompson’s The Insult, James Ellroy’s Cold 6000 and Dan Simmon’s Ilium and Olympus.

Terry Pratchett

I don’t know exactly where this places me on the Kevin Bacon scale but I once finished the bottle of Silent Sam vodka that Terry Pratchett started. And though I consider myself a fan, I suppose if I was a real one, the half drunk hootch would still be sitting in some place of honour in my domicile. But apparently, I am thirstier than I am sentimental.

What made me the fan I am of the man comes more from that night than his books. I did read the first two, Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic, and at the time I thought, here is someone who can actually write fantasy humour. For some reason, though little fantasy humour deserves to be published, a lot of it is. Pratchett is one of the few who can actually manage the delicate balance of comedy and the fanciful. I never did continue on to the rest of the 33 Discworld books but I remember those early ones fondly.

But it was the man that night that impressed me most. First of all, he took the stage like the most accomplished stand-up comedian and raconteur, speaking of living, of writing, and my friend of the soup, who had not read a word of his, found herself enraptured and in an almost unbroken state of helpless laughter. And second, though I have been around many authors, renowned and not, none have been quite as gracious with misfits, with the awkward ones who desire, such as the few I saw sporting remarkably bad theatrical English accents and costumes, which he seemed to both ignore and appreciate, posing for pictures with any and all, and with seemingly boundless genuine warmth.

And now at the age of 59 this good and creative man has been diagnosed with Alzheimers and is feeling the first symptoms. There is a good recent article in The Guardian about his situation and his reaction to it. He says, regarding the sorry state of research in the area and of his prospects, “Personally I’d eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.” When I forwarded the article to a dear friend who I knew was a big fan of his work, she said she’d be happy to do the same if it did any good.

Don’t like books

Well, its not exactly that I don’t like them, I just am not enthralled by old ones, antiques ones, collections of them. I love literature, love reading but books to me are no different than cds or dvds in that its what’s inside that counts.

And having said that, I find certain designs very cool, such as the metal curved book below. When I was a bookseller I saw many designs that left me flabbergasted; that one, another from Phaidon in an airfilled bubble, books as pillows, books with texture, with smells, books that folded out for yards. But I like interesting designs on shampoo bottles too.

My house is full of books but they are simply artifacts of my reading -the leftovers. People who came into the store knew me as a voracious and far ranging reader and simply assumed I liked books as objects. Kind of. For a minute. But no more than a good looking dinner laid out in front of me. I’m thinking it looks good but what does it taste like, and once I’ve eaten, it is behind me.

Burp.

Bunch o’ stuff

1. First of all we have a collection of strange accidents from widelec.org via growabrain.

2. Second, and obviously very much unrelated to the above, is an interview with crime novelist Robert Parker which gives good reasons for why his books are so goddamn bad; he admits to never revising his first draft. I have never understood why he continues to receive acclaim. This article follows on the heels of the Telegraphs’s 50 Crime Writers to Read Before You Die, and calls Parker “an unrivalled pulp stylist who may be the best crime writer you’ve never read”. What crap!

It is really one of the worst best lists I have ever read. I can only imagine it was put together by someone who went to the library and simply wrote down the first 50 authors in the mystery section. And it appears some misfiling was going on at the library as well since Charles Dickens ends up on the list.

3. And over at Conscientious, J.M. Colberg has a provocative discussion of portraiture and what we might be looking for. One of the examples used is the Avedon photo of Cat Power below. And the article will illustrate why I picked this picture over the other one discussed.

4. And moving on with more music, a recent write-up in Newsweek regarding music and race and authenticity which reminded me of Faking It by Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker which is worth looking at for anybody interested in music history and the concept of authenticity. According to the book, in the early days of the blues, musicians then like now, traded music and there was not much of a race difference. Blacks were singing protocountry, whites protoblues, and it all was aimed at what people wanted to hear. When the musicologists descended into the backwoods looking for roots they imposed the color bars, disregarding those who sang across lines, looking for kind of a noble savage authenticity rather than what really had happened.

5. And what better excuse for this Kids in the Hall video of Mark McKinney as Mississippi Gary: