Sins of literature: the general popular with his troops

Having taken a tour of Civil War named streets in my neighborhood, I'm thinking, naturally, of George B. McClellan.  The Seven Days battles happened on his retreat down the Peninsula, and marked the advent of Robert E. Lee.  Second Manassas (see?  I'm not unreasonable about the name itself, just seeing it in my neighborhood) happened when McClellan was temporarily replaced by Pope, successful in the West, who then got creamed by Lee.

McClellan was a superb manager and a terrible leader.  We most value those who rise to the top in a crisis, even though most time is spent in non-crisis.  McClellan was at his worst in a crisis, and at his best with the routine.

McClellan's men loved him.  And why not?  He kept them fed, supplied, and, as far as he could, safe from combat.  He would only put them in harm's way when he had overwhelming superiority of numbers.  Vain, self-important, and paranoid, McClellan would make a poor hero of a work of fiction.

But writers often use "popular with his troops" as an index of admirability.  And, I suppose, it is.  Lee was popular with his troops too, and Lee is a classic fictional hero.  But humans can love, en masse, people they would not admire or even like individually.  Can fiction handle a popular, pompous narcissist?  History certainly can.

More Civil War street names

Not far from my house is the site of Camp Cameron, where annual musters were held before the Civil War.  It was then an actual camp, for new recruits, until neighbors complained about how rowdy the young troops were, and they were moved elsewhere.  The land, straddling Cambridge and Somerville, was developed in the 1880s.

The short little streets there have names from the Seven Days Battles of the Peninsular Campaign:  Malvern, Glendale, Seven Pines, and Fair Oaks*.  Never mind that Seven Pines and Fair Oaks are two names for the same battle.  I like to think that these were names the soldiers gave to roads between lines of tents, which hung around until houses were built there, but another street is named Yorktown, which is a developer-type name, used for high schools, shopping centers, etc.

History is important to developers.  An attractive conversion of factory buildings to condos on the other side of Cameron Avenue is on a street proudly named Tannery Brook.  In the actual age of tanneries (and there were a lot around here--I live in what was the low-rent, swampy, smelly, Irish and French-Canadian area of town) that would not have been a selling point.

Bloody battles and smelly industrial operations become charming if seen from far enough away.

*I get this wrong all the time:  Seven Pines/Fair Oaks was part of the overall campaign, but not part of the Seven Days Battles.  My apologies to the real buffs.

Unreasonable rage at a street name

Near my children's school, here in Cambridge, Mass., is a short street with a name that, for a long time, irritated me.  The street is called Manassas Avenue.

Two things bugged me.  In 1861 and 1862 two battles took place at a creek in northern Virginia called Bull Run.  The first was the first battle of the Civil War.  So, the first thing:  we northerners call those battles the first and second battles of Bull Run, since we favored geographic features while southerners favored the nearest town when naming battles.  But Manassas, I have to say, seems to be winning out, and I see the battles referred to more often that way than I remember from my youth.  I can kind of deal with that, though I always suspect the loyalties of the National Park Service.

But, the stranger thing:  we lost.  The North got its butt handed to it in both those battles.  Can historical knowledge have fallen so low that a street in the heart of the heart of the North, Cambridge, got that awful name?  Any Gettysburg Streets in Charleston or New Orleans?  Somehow, I doubt it.

Well, come to find out, Manassas Ave. is named after a person, Manasses P. Dougherty.  The name was changed in 1907, from Sparks St. Court.

I'm still suspicious.  Why the spelling change?  A southern sympathiser in the Registry of Deeds?  Rewriting history is those people's favorite hobby.  You can't take anything for granted.

Butcher knives and other improper signifiers

The Boston Globe had a story recently about people being honored for saving a woman from being murdered by her husband with butcher knife.  They did a dangerous and brave thing, but that's not what struck me.

It was "butcher knife".  This what might be called a "headline signifier":  that is, something, probably not accurate, that catches the reader's eye and conveys the meaning, rather than the actually reality, of events.

Most people do not have anything called a "butcher knife" in their home, mostly because no one butchers meat at home.  But saying someone was attacked with a "utility knife" or a "chef's knife" would seem to be minimizing the risk, while at the same time being inappropriately finicky about terminology.

We accept this, though, I admit, I always think "well, what kind of knife was it?"  When someone attacks someone else with an item found in the kitchen, do they grab the boning knife or the santoku?  A writer's mind wants to know.

Related (albeit distantly) to this is the event, found in even sober history books, of someone being "torn limb from limb" by a mob.  Or, even more dramatically, "torn to pieces".

Maybe this literally happened.  But seeing these phrases in place of  the more mundane "killed by an angry mob" makes me wonder what actually did occur.   The medieval and early modern practice of "quartering" usually involved cutting the body into parts with (wait for it) a butcher knife, or, in French style, attaching horses to to the limbs in a coordinated effort.  The human body is pretty well constructed.  Beating someone to death and tearing a few pieces off (what I presume is what usually happened when someone was attacked by a mob) is relatively easy, the other things relatively hard, particularly with a tightly packed group of people who probably can't move freely to begin with.

This is actually sounding kind of gruesome.  But "torn limb from limb" is a seemingly meaningful description that raises a number of questions when you think about it.  I'm not currently planning to describe the death of a character at the hands of a mob, but if I do, I'd like to get it right.  Where should I turn?

Biblical marketing

I'm a big fan of the Shorpy. Every day it posts interesting historical photographs, often in high definition. Commenters remark on various almost invisible aspects of the photographs--and if they miss something obvious, they are mocked by the ominipotent Dave. Being mostly male, it seems, they get quite excited over photographs of attractive women, and discussions about tooth-straightening, style, and cosmetic surgery ensue.

A comment on this image of a Washington D.C. drugstore in 1921 caught my eye. It points out a number of bottles of a popular grape juice called, believe it or not, Naboth. The commenter links to a postcard from the Naboth bottling plant.

Am I alone in finding this name for a juice company crazy?  If you remember the story, Naboth owned a vineyard near King Ahab's palace.  Ahab wanted it for himself, Naboth wouldn't give it up, so Queen Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be stoned to death on false evidence.  Ahab got his vineyard, but Elijah told him he would be slain in the spot where Naboth was executed, and the dogs would lick his blood and eat Jezebel's body (1 Kg 21:1-20).

Who could pass up a marketing hook like that for wholesome grape juice?  Along with the Gibeah Motor Court, Jehu's Driving School, and Joshua's Walls and Masonry, not to mention the annual Jephtha Father Daughter Dance, a way of linking our daily life to uplifting Biblical events.

It's amazing how often people grab the first top-of-mind connection for their marketing, no matter how little sense it actually makes.  Naboth:grapes.  Sure, perfect!

My favorite non-Biblical clueless marketing link is a holiday hotel I read about called "Nessun Dorma".  Opera is just as good as the Bible for vague connections no one is entirely sure of.  This is one of the most famous arias around, from Turandot, particularly through Pavarotti's rendition.  Very romantic.

It means "None shall sleep".

6 reasons you should donate blood, not money

I don't like getting stuck with needles, but I still give blood.  I did yesterday, in a church basement near work.

I love giving blood because, aside from not costing me any money, it is incredibly efficient.  Money donations are often completely wasted, or used for some purpose other than you intend, or are used in some ineffective way.  Blood is different.

1. Blood isn't fungible.  That is, it can really only be used for putting into someone else's body and not for any other purpose.  So you know where it's going.  I suppose someone could sell it, and thus turn it into fungible money, but I don't hear of that, not in this country.
2. Blood can't be used for fun.  Relatedly, no is tempted to go on a tear with blood.  Most people, actually, don't want the stuff around.
3. Blood can't be used to pay administrative costs.  Most charities spend huge quantities, perhaps most of the money they get, to pay salaries, marketing costs, office rents, etc. etc.
4. Blood is something people really need.  You don't have to worry that your aid is being poured into some useless dam or training course or anything else with an unknown or negative outcome.
5. Blood is something people really need.  And there isn't enough of it.  The people who need it, really need it, in an immediate and clear way.
6. You can always make more.  If you're healthy, you keep cranking out those red blood cells and plasma anyway.  In the end, it really doesn't cost you anything.

When you give money, you often have no idea of what you're giving, and who you're giving it to.  With blood, you're hitting the target.

The Red Cross has improved its processes in the past few years, but I still think they could revamp their marketing and outreach, and get their donation rates up substantially.  But that's for another time.

The vanished sport of fox tossing

When we read historical novels, or fantasy novels with a historical setting, do we want to know what it was really like?  Do we want to see our characters behave in ways actually consistent with their time?

I'm reading Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory, an history of Europe 1648-1815.  Not a strictly chronological history, but a largely material and cultural one, starting with an informative discussion of roads, and how incredibly hard it was to get from one place to another, no matter who you were.

But it's the entertainments of the past that sometimes make clearest its distance from us.  In a chapter on the incredible prominence of various types of hunting in the lives of the rulers and aristocrats, Blanning tells about a popular sport in German lands:  fox tossing

...in which a fox was tossed in a net or blanket held by hunt servants or gentlemen and ladies of the court until it expired.  This usually took place in the courtyard of the prince's palace with the assembled courtiers looking on from the palace windows.  The Saxons seem to have been particularly fond of this form of entertainment:  in the course of 1747 Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had 414 foxes, 281 hares, 39 badgers and 9 wild cats tossed to death.  It could also be found at the imperial court at Vienna, where in 1672 the Swedish envoy found it odd that the Emperor Leopold I should join with the court dwarves and small boys in delivering the coup de grace to the tossed foxes by clubbing them to death

I have to admit, I'm not clear on what the cause of death was.  Did the animals suffocate?  Get smashed on the ground?  Or was post-toss bludgeoning always required?  I suspect that this is not high on a list of sexy research topics for history graduate students, but surely someone can be persuaded to dig into it.

In this period these lands also favored a form of hunting where animals were herded by beaters into an enclosure on a lake or river, so that hunters in boats could kill huge quantities of them without needing to do anything other than pull a trigger.

All good fun.  A historical fiction where the character pursued the actual pleasures of his or her age could be both disturbing and informative.  Imagine a cheery nobleman, a good master, who cheers his crew up with an entertaining fox toss before dinner.  Not only is it fun, it gets rid of foxes.  Clubbing them, however, makes you absurd.  Leave that to the boys.

After the Victory: finished draft

Today I finished a big draft of my next book:  After the Victory.  It's big and hulking, not because the eventual book will be, but because that's the only way I've found to get my drafts done.  I see this version as the ore that will eventually be refined into the final book.  It's easier for me to write four lines and pick the best than write the best one by itself.  If I try that, nothing gets done.

Some more precise people (like my friend James Patrick Kelly) find this appalling, like building a house by piling up rocks and then carving rooms out of it (my simile, not his).

After the Victory is the story of Alba, a girl who grows up on an Earth in the aftermath of a successfully defeated alien invasion.  Even though victory has been won, the Earth is a mess of burned cities and devastated landscapes, littered with the dangerous and valuable remains of crashed alien spacecraft.  Alba is an Invasion orphan, living with a tight group of other kids in a refugee camp/school run by a mysterious Invasion vet, Nunc.  One night, out on alert, she and her friends find a hint that at least one of the invading aliens may still be alive and on the run....

Unsold, unseen, and unfinished!  I have to let it rest for a while before I turn back to it.  Don't expect any detailed description of my writing process, however.  When I reach the next milestone, I'll let you know.

Lepanto, Manzikert, and the rusty hinge of history

Last discussion of Lepanto and the 16th century battles for the Mediterranean, I promise.  At least for now.

An incredibly divided multinational force--Venetian, Spanish, Italian, and the Knights of St. John--internally hostile and suspicious, started late in the year.  If the Ottoman commander, Uluch Ali, had chosen not to leave his harbor within the Gulf of Patras, there was no way the Europeans could have gotten him out.  And, though the battle on October 7, 1571 went heavily for the Christians during the day, it could easily have gone the other way.

Lepanto, dramatic as it was, was not decisive.  Ottoman domination of the eastern Mediterranean continued.  Cyprus had fallen.  As long as a century later, in 1683, Ottoman forces were seriously threatening Vienna.

The hinge here is if the Europeans had lost.  Then Venice, and all of Italy, would have been open to Ottoman invasion.  A Rome under Turkish rule is one of those interesting counterfactuals we science fiction writers like to play with.  The entire Reformation would look quite different with the heart of Catholicism taken out and turned over to a resurgent Islam.

The Turks did not pursue their expansion into the western Mediterranean after Lepanto, so maybe it did check them.  But they did not really regard it as a strategic defeat.  When do nations recognize defeat?  How do they recognize it?

After Hannibal's invasion of Italy, the Romans lost at Trebia, Lake Trasimene, Cannae.  Massive, incredible defeats.  But they did not recognize them.  Hannibal was probably hoping for them to cave in, as any Hellenistic monarchy of the time certainly would have.

When Romanus IV Diogenes loast the battle of Manzikert, in Anatolia, in 1071 to the Seljuk Turks (slightly different folk than the Ottomans), the period of Byzantine ascendancy was over.  But the battle, while a defeat, was not a gigantic one.  Most Byzantine forces survived.  Anatolia, the heartland of Asia Minor that was a source of wealth and troops to the empire, was lost over the following years, piecemeal.  The battle seemed more a symbol of defeat than anything else.  It had been a sign that their time was over.  The Ottomans did not see Lepanto as a sign, and the Romans did not see their repeated defeats as a sign either.

Writers of history and writers of fiction like "decisive battles".  It makes for a good story.  And the nation that loses the battle is always seen as decadent, collapsing, riven with internal struggles, on the way down.  Losing the battle is seen as a judgment, even as a sort of justice.  But wealthy powerful nations sometimes have bad luck, bad commanders, or even, as it happens, bad soldiers.  It is what they do with the battle that is usually more important than what happened in the battle itself.

Clear explanations of complex things

As I've mentioned, in my day job I am a marketing director.  One of the things this means is that I fairly regularly have to learn about and understand a new product, a new service, or a new customer type.  This involves a lot of fairly unsystematic research, because the intersection between customer needs and product is hard to define.

It's always a pleasure to find someone who can explain the customers needs in some clear, easily understood way.  And, as it happens, finding someone like that is fairly rare.

Right now, I am planning to market a physical capital planning product to healthcare clients--hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and others with complex buildings and physical systems.  Where their money comes from, where it goes, how they plan, what they worry about most--these are the issues I'm struggling with.

So I was happy to find a useful introductory document from The Access Project at the Harvard School of Public Health:  A Community Leader's Guide to Hospital Finance, Evaluating How a Hospital Gets and Spends Its Money, by Sarah Gunther Lane, Elizabeth Longstreth, and Victoria Nixon.  I certainly could have used this in my days at the Medicaid health plan, where various abstruse issues like Disproportionate Share Hospital or “DSH” payments were a constant conundrum.  Thank you, Lane, Longstreth, and Nixon.

Now, as it happens, this piece did not answer a single one of my questions about how healthcare facilities spend, plan, and budget for fixed equipment and building costs.  Not their fault, that's not what they were after.

So I'm still looking for a similar document about that unsexy and essential feature of hospital facilities:  the actual real estate.  Side point: you can't understand health care finance by looking only at the provision of actual care and reimbursement for it.  That's most important, certainly.  But look at jobs, and look at the value of the real estate, and some seemingly perverse decisions and practices will become, if not clear, at least somewhat less contradictory seeming.

But that's for another time.

Long book, great crime

A couple of days ago I mentioned lengthy titles and subtitles, a style now vanished.  I was reminded of a favorite takedown of a long-winded writer by Thomas Macaulay (no stranger to length himself), in a review of a book on Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister for decades, by the unfortunate Rev. Edward Nares.  Macaulay writes:

The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with the astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when he first landed in Brobdignag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys.  The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale.  The title is as long as an ordinary preface;  the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book;  and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library.

...

Compared to the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is agreeable recreation.

He goes on from there, destroying in detail once the ground is softened up with rhetoric, and Dr. Nares, no doubt, never showed his face again.

Macaulay is also irritated with Nares for his extoling of Burghley's moral virtue, and his account of a politic and wily minister amid the shifting sands of the Reformation can't be bettered:

He never deserted his friends till it was very inconvenient to stand by them, was an excellent Protestant when it was not very advantageous to be a Papist, recommended a tolerant policy to his msitress as strongly as he could recommend it without hazarding her favour, never put to the rack any person from whom it did not seem probable that useful information could be derived, and was so moderate in his desires that he left only three hundred distinct landed estates, though he might...have left much more.

For a politician, this is virtue.  The rest of the essay is a delicate anatomizing of the perils of the period, and of how the Tudors ruled, "a popular government, under the forms of despotism".  Nares is forgotten, as the ostensible reasons for Macaulay's essays so often are, except for a last smack when Macaulay says he must stop, lest his essay

...swell to a bulk exceeding that of other reviews, as much as Dr. Nares's book exceeds the bulk of all other histories."

Truth in History

A few days ago, while discussing memoirs, and whether there is any way to trust them, I mentioned the history book I was reading, Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.

We seem to be heading back to those gigantic 18th century titles which were miniature essays in themselves.

Empires of the Sea covers the events of the huge conflict between an expanding Ottoman Empire and an aggressive, but at that point defensive, Christian south, mostly Habsburgs and Venetians.  Throughtout that period Europe was on the defensive.  North African raiders landed on the coasts with impunity and kidnapped incredible numbers of slaves.  It's not generally thought that, even as the Spanish were landing in the New World, conquering and wreaking havoc, they themselves were on the receiving end of landings and assaults.

Crowley's book is good, but I have an affection for an earlier account of the same events, Jack Beeching's The Galleys at Lepanto, which is much better on bringing out the personalities of the various participants.  Crowley's characters seem, from a fiction writer's perspective, poorly realized.

Of course these battles, kidnappings, and deaths are like the dance of sand grains on a vast motor housing when you read Fernand Braudel's incredible The Mediterranean and the Meditarranean World in the Age of Philip II, and find out how the motor works.  Narrative history makes up a large percentage of my free reading, but I remember reading Braudel's deep exploration of geography, climate, technology, economics, migrations, and social relations with as much interest as any story with a plot.

Now that I've pulled it off my shelf, I may need to read it again, all 1200 pages or so of it.  Thick and square, indeed.

Braudel is, I would say, an essential for a fantasy writer, or anyone trying to create a believable world, because he really gives you an understanding of how it works.

And he has those odd, casual intellectual toss offs that I like so much.  From a footnote about the island of Djerba, site of several significant battles, a propos of its production of olive oil:

On Djerba as well as olive trees there grew palm trees, apple trees, and pear trees.  From this point of view too it was an unusual island.  And Djerba as an island conservatory harboured Jewish communities said to date from the persecutions of Titus; above all it was a small Kharijite world, like the Mzab, the repository of ancient ritual and extremely old types of architecture.

Sounds exactly like Jorge Luis Borges, actually.  But longer.

Now, complete with stories

I finally put up some of my short fiction.  These are all stories I have reason to feel proud of, and which, I think it is safe to say, are relatively obscure.

"The Fury at Colonus" is the Oresteia told as a police procedural, with a Fury as the weary detective.  "Fragments of a Painted Eggshell" is about memory as art, and the issues of good people who, for one reason or another, are just not good parents.  "Market Report" is exactly that:  why are people in this particular suburb turning to the Pleistocene for their entertainment?

The slipperiness of truth

I wrote some thoughts about truth and prevarication in personal nonfiction yesterday, and, primed for the topic, found myself on the train to work reading an essay in The New York Review of Books about the essays of George Orwell, "Such, Such Was Eric Blair", by Julian Barnes, in which he discusses the question of the truth, or lack of same, in Orwell's account in "Shooting An Elephant", about his days in Burma.

As Barnes says, of Orwell:

...he taught us that even if 100 percent truth is unobtainable, then 67 percent is and always will be better than 66 percent, and that even such a small percentage point is a morally nonnegotiable unit.

Then Barnes sets out doubts, about the elephant, about a hanging, even about the wretched school so vividly described in "Such, Such Were The Joys".  The elephant was shot, but had not killed a man, and the consequences to Orwell were negative and damaged his reputation.  The hanging was a "composite", that dreaded journalistic crime that got Janet Cooke sacked from the Washington Post back in 1981.  And the school wasn't as bad as described.

The school I won't discuss:  our experiences at school, or in a family, can be horrible and completely different from the person we sit next to at lunch, or our sibling, so different that conversation about what happened may be forever impossible, outside of novels or intimate essays.

But the other two.... According to Barnes, David Lodge (one of my favorite writers, as it happens) argues

...that the value of the two Burmese essays does not rest on their being factually true.

Except that it does.  It may not rest solely on the facts, because it also rests on prose and structure.  The facts are not sufficient.  But they are necessary.  That one percent does matter.  Even if your readers, even if they are as astute and thoughtful as David Lodge, want you to trade truth for something they think they value more.

Is there such a thing as personal nonfiction?

Nonfiction exists as a category, of course.  I'm reading Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea, about the 16th century struggle in the Mediterranean between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, and have no reason to doubt Crowley's account of the siege of Malta or the fall of Cyprus.

But personal memoirs are also fall into "nonfiction".  That is starting to seem much more dubious.  Many supposed memoirs (James Frey, Holocaust memoirs of being raised by wolves or fed by girls throwing apples across the fence, J T LeRoy, etc.) have recently been shown to be partly or largely fictional.  I don't think the truth-quality of memoirs has dropped.  I think the revelation of their falseness has been made easier.

One of my favorite blogs, prairiemary, recently mentioned something that has been out for a few years that, I will admit, did disturb me.  On Thursday she mentioned that the opening of Annie Dillard's memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where her tomcat comes through her window at night with bloody feet and leaves bloody pawprints on the bare skin of her chest didn't happen to her, but to a male student of hers, who gave her permission to use it as her own.

That book is wonderfully written, but I'd always doubted the "some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood".  My body?  Covered?  Some mornings?  I'd buy some blood on a nightgown once, and some dead animals (as Mary mentions) at other times.  The most common way memoirists distort events is to take the occasional or unique and make it habitual and characteristic of a period.

So:  did I "always doubt" it?  Or did it just occur to me, thinking back?  Here's the real problem of truth-in-memoir.  Even I can't quite be sure.

Now I know it didn't happen to Dillard.  And, most likely, it didn't happen to her student either, at least not exactly as described.  And how voluntary was the transfer of the story from student to teacher?

Whenever something like this comes out, there are those who say it doesn't matter, that they responded to the quality of the prose, or the psychological truth.  I can never figure out what these people are talking about.

I tell lies.  That's what my books are.  They are not true.  They didn't happen, and, in fact, could not happen.  I like to think that there is quality prose and psychological truth in what I write.

But it matters if something happened, or if it didn't.  The Turkish fleet really was repulsed at Malta, and really did conquer Cyprus.  Discovering that the dramatic defense of the fortress of St. Elmo at Malta was a fictional creation intended to boost the spirit of a beleaguered Europe would meaningfully change our perception of 16th century history.

Maybe that doesn't matter to some people.  It does to me.

Actors and Their Histories

I'm part of the aging cohort of subscribers to the Huntington Theater, one of our local theater companies.  Huntington productions are often worthy, and occasionally appalling--but not in a good way (newer playwrights sometimes give the impression of never having actually seen a play--but I'll have to deal with those experiences at a later time).  Last night was Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green, a self-congratulatory autobiographical play of literary education that managed to be both earnest and creepy.  It dates from the 1930s, when there were a lot of stages to fill, and a lot of plays written to fill them, and a lot of people who took them seriously.

It starred Kate Burton (Richard Burton's daughter), and her son.  Richard Burton was Welsh, the play is set in Wales, so Kate and her son spoke of their Welsh heritage, their visits to Wales, etc.

Last time I saw Kate Burton on the Huntington stage, she was in an excellent production of Hedda Gabler.  I don't recall her mentioning her Norwegian heritage then.

I would love to see an actor in one of these things not mention the heritage, the teacher, the experience in youth, or the neighbor that connects them to the play, but admit that they are actors, and that their personal background is completely irrelevant to their performance.  It is their skill and talent that makes them successful, and it is the author's words that connect them, and us, to the play.

But then what would the busy graduate students who probably write these things do with their time?  And what would I be doing while waiting for scene changes?

Edge Urban -- Why I Live Where I Do

Sometimes I wonder why I live where I do.  It's crowded and expensive.  And there are no sophisticated boutiques or elegant watering holes near me.  My local bar, where I meet my friends to drink, is Joe Sent Me, half sports bar, half college hangout.  It does have a mural of Bogey and Elisha Cook Jr. on the wall (though, for a long time, I wondered if Elisha Cook Jr. was Richard Widmark, though I couldn't imagine what movie that was from).  I live in suburban Cambridge.  I have a driveway and a yard.

But I have a half hour bike ride to work.  I work in a curvy building in the Financial District building in 1873, and the bike messengers get high in the little park in front of my building, beneath an incongruously rustic statue of Robert Burns and his dog--don't ask why that is in Winthrop Square.  When the temperature gets below 10 degrees or there is ice and snow on the ground, I take the subway.

And today I drove 15 minutes to Lincoln, and went cross-country skiing through fresh snow for a couple of hours.  My favorite trail goes past Walden Pond.  That landscape is certainly not wilderness--I was in the Sawtooth Range of Idaho a few months ago, and I know the difference.  It is, instead, a humanized landscape.  You cross roads here and there, sometimes the trail goes across farm fields that have to be kept operational by severe land-use restrictions, and you're never very far from a house, but it is silent and elegant.

Some of Massachusetts, like everywhere, is thoughtless and ugly.  But a lot of it is thoughtful, and lived-in, and gives the distinct impression that there may be more to things than getting and spending.  And I like it fine.

The Ultimate Critic

I'm currently reading Rodric Braithwaite's excellent Moscow 1941, an account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union with a focus of the life of the city itself.

Russia had been in the grips of the Terror since the start of the big purges in 1937:

In the four years before the war more than thirty-two thousand people died at the hands of the secret police in Moscow and the surrounding Region.

Two corpse disposal zones had been set up outside the city, one at Butovo, the other at Kommunarka.  Most of the elite, including artists and writers, were killed at the NKVD dacha at Kommunarka.  And it's here that I learned of a figure I had not heard of before, but about whom I intend to learn more, Vasili Blokhin:

Many of these executions were carried out by a squad under the command of Vasili Blokhin, a specialist in such matters.  Blokhin is said to have personally killed the theatre director Meyerhold, the writer Isaak Babel and Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

Blokhin also took a key role in the 1940 Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps, "wearing a leather apron and cap and long leather gloves":  he apparently carried out many of the killings of the Polish POWs personally, with a German Walther pistol he favored because it didn't jam when hot, at Mednoe, north of Moscow.

How is it that Blokhin is not better known?  The winnowing of writers in those years was brutal:  first silenced, then tortured and killed.  And if Blokhin did indeed carry out the killings personally, he was probably the last person to see them before they died.  Whether they saw him, I don't know.

Stealing Characters

I recently watched "The Letter", a 1940 William Wyler movie starring Bette Davis.  I picked it up because the culture guide Terry Teachout, who blogs at About Last Night, has written the libretto to an opera based on it (or, rather, on the original Maugham story).

It's about murder, betrayal of ideals, and corruption in pre-war Malaya.  That "pre-war" is interesting.  This was filmed a little more than a year before Japanese forces conquered the entire country, besieged Singapore, and destroyed this entire society. So, no matter what long-term guilts or pains the characters expected to have, they were completely overcome by events.

I get story ideas from movies, more more so than from books.  This happens in several ways.  I always try to predict what will happen next, and if I'm completely wrong, my prediction can serve as the basis for a story.  And I'm often more interested in minor characters than the movie, with its limited airtime, can be.  In this case, it was the lawyer Howard Joyce's legal assistant Ong Chi Seng.  Ong is the one who presents Joyce with his occasion of sin, by offering him something he desperately needs.  It's played pretty straightforwardly in the movie.  Aside from a cute bit with Ong's tiny little car, he's just a device.

But he can be a device because he's linked into a complex society the ruling Brits do not have real access to.  Who is he?  Has he helped the lawyer before in this way?  Does he have motivations aside from money for doing it?  None of this is the point of the movie, and so none of these questions are answered.  He serves as the guide to a crucial confrontation in the Asian part of town, but again, solely as a device.  Fixers and liminal characters like Ong are interesting, and he could easily have been a major character, with the murder and trial just as background to his own activities.

I have not yet read the original story.  I'm curious to see what role he plays there.  If it is similarly minor, I can claim him, or a version of him, for myself.