The writer's bait and switch: Tana French

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Some time ago, a friend lent me two books by the Irish author Tana French, In the Woods, and The Likeness.  I enjoyed them both--obviously I enjoyed the first or would not have read the second. Oddly, despite French's obviously popularity, I had never heard of her, so I'm grateful to Sherri for having introduced me to her. Who else am I missing?

Both are mysteries, the first ostensibly a police procedural, the second a kind of "agent in place" investigation. Both have problems (which I'll get to in a minute), but, on a sentence-by-sentence, scene-by-scene read move right along, with sharp description, dialogue, characterization, and pace. As I think I've said before, high-end mysteries have it all over science fiction in the area of pure technical skill. And by that, I don't mean some kind of arid mechanics. I mean the deliberate means by which prose induces emotional, intellectual, and visceral reactions in the reader. I'm reminded of a fine mystery writer from across the North Channel in Scotland, Denise Mina--though Mina is much meaner to her characters than French is. I'll have to deal with her elsewhere.

When you find problems in an otherwise extremely well done book, you have to question whether the problem is an inherent consequence of the same choices that made the book work in the first place. There is no perfect narrative solution to certain issues, and sometimes focusing on certain difficiencies just makes you look clueless.  You don't look to comedies for deep characterization, and epiphany-directed stories don't benefit from suspense.

So what are the issues?  In In The Woods, French presents a scarring past experience involving a couple of vanished children, which in the end, plays little role save as "character's secret hurt" and is never explained. This is just a tease, a selling point in the initial pitch, and the source of cover copy. It's always important to remember that books are not just discrete chunks of prose, but devices that need to operate in the market as well as in the individual reader's head.  This kind of bait-and-switch is annoying, but somewhat understandable.

The point of view character, Rob Ryan, needs that secret hurt to make him interesting, and to motivate him when necessary, so it's not just a tease. His relationship with his partner, Cassie, is an extended adolescent crush, which eventually gets tiresome, though his emotional retardation (he's in his 30s, and a homicide cop, for heaven's sake) plays a plot role too, because Rob has to be almost absurdly obtuse at a couple of points to keep the plot going. Tiresome, but the plot does keep going, so you forgive the kludges that let it do so.

The Likeness, in which Carrie is the point of view character, depends on a piece of melodramatic coincidence so absurd the experienced science fiction reader instantly reaches for explanations from our genre:  time travel, matter duplication, cloning.  Cassie's exact double is found dead, murdered.  If you're wondering whether you'll ever find out why they are exact doubles, forget it:  this is the given that generates the plot, and is never explained.  Pick a science fictional explanation, if you want.

Cassie takes over the other woman's identity in order to find out who killed her. That's a great suspense generator. She finds herself in a hothouse situation in a beautiful old house full of beautiful academics.  Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine likes this kind of forcing vat of interpersonal conflict. It's also clearly reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, as well as part of a P. D. James novel, An Unsuitable Job For a Woman, in which the reluctant detective, Cordelia Gray, must infiltrate a similar academic idyll.  That book also works with some of the class stresses that underlie French's work.  I enjoyed The Likeness too, on a page by page level, but found the contrivance more annoying than I would have liked. But, again, no contrivance, no book, so it's a trade I'm willing to make.

While there is clearly a limit, readers are willing to forgive a lot in order to get an entertaining, compelling book. In workshops we often pound on the logic of the story. Sometimes resolving all the contradictions resolves the book into nothing. Something I, addicted to rationality, will need to think about.

Good books.  Recommended.

Character and sugar water

We'd like to think of our personality traits as robust and defining. The characters writers create have stable and clear personality traits--that's what makes them memorable to the reader.  If you read a good novel, that certainly seems to be what real people are like.

But it seems that many of our own best traits are really tiny, weak muscles, like the little finger's wonderfully named flexor digiti minimi brevis, easily exhausted and thus useless when overused.

Sometimes a dose of glucose can revive them.  Our willpower can get stronger, as can our control over expression of some of our less acceptable personality traits, like racial prejudice, as expressed by various celebrities in stressed situations.

The latter issue, about racist tendencies becoming more pronounced with tiredness or other fontal lobe inhibiting states, has some interesting features. The linked article, "I'm only racist when I'm drunk" (from the excellent Mindhacks) says

The idea is not that all of these people are racist, but that we have absorbed negative cultural associations that tend to push our thinking in the direction of prejudice and we need to make a conscious effort to act even-handedly to counter-balance this tendency.

Is a character who uses the frontal lobe to inhibit some satisficing heuristics that happen to stereotype ethnic and racial groups admirable, or not? Remember, those heuristics just have to work somewhat better than random chance to be reinforced. Stereotypes certainly do make life easier.  In previous eras they were used unashamedly and openly. Refusal to subscribe to known prejudices made you, in fact, suspect and worthy of contempt.

So our characters struggle against this side of themselves--though it's tempting to make the admirable characters be the ones who do not have any such internal contradictions.  Sober, untired, fully glucosed, the character has the resources to devote to distinguishing individuals and judging them as such. Drunk, tired, hungry, the character uses lazy hacks and hurts and offends others by sampling too infrequently. Do we dare to portray someone that way?  Where does the actual "character" live?

Of course, yelling racist epithets--"spewing" is pretty much the de rigueur verb here, which is why I'm avoiding it--is something affirmative, not merely making errors of inappropriate categorization. Such a character affirmatively dislikes individuals who fall into a certain category.  Again, expression of that dislike is controlled, until that frontal lobe minimi brevis just gives out from the day's demands.

So, maybe celebrities who know that they might lose control while on camera  (which is now pretty much all the time) should keep an emergency vial of sugar water handy.  It just might save their career.

 

 

Dorothy Dunnett and the exquisite villain

This year, as last time, I took a Dorothy Dunnett book on my hike. Somehow I can't read her in real life, but I find her compelling on the trail. Some books require being sent back to a previous era--I only read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon because a dangerous storm at high altitude stranded me in a tent for twenty four hours. And I loved that too, once that was all I had to do.

Many people like the Crawford of Lymond books. I haven't tried them because I dislike dashing, devilishly charming heroes who women instantly fall in love with, which is how I imagine him to be.  Actually, the whole Scottish thing doesn't appeal to me. I don't even like Scotch--bourbon and Irish are my whiskeys. Not that I'm opposed to all things Scottish.  But I prefer David Hume and Groundskeeper Willy as representatives of the breed.  Nothing dashing there.

So I'm reading about an insanely intelligent, manipulative, and not quite sane Fleming named Claes. Of course he's great in the sack, but you can't really get away from that with your bestselling heroes, can you? The Niccolo series is a quick travelogue across the world of the late 15th century.

The best thing about the novels (at the least two I've read so far) are the villains. Both Simon (the big villain) and Doria (the smaller one in The Spring of the Lamb) are genuinely compelling. Doria was sly, manipulative, sexually voracious, vicious, charming, and dangerous. And the villains are assisted in their machinations by people emotionally close to Claes who don't actually care that he's the hero of the stories.

The least good thing is Claes's band of associates. They are described as having distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, but I have a great deal of trouble detecting specific personalities.  The books would be much stronger if they were as specific as the villains.

I do hope I get to read another one before I'm on the trail again.

Winner party trick: Napoleon's death mask

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As background research to a possible novel (19th century mystery involving a sculptor, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Catholicism, and homoeroticism: stay tuned), I recently read Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire, which purports to be about Stanford White, her paternal great grandfather, and his influence on her family, but is, as usual with such memoirs, mostly about Suzannah Lessard. It's pretty entertaining, actually.

The most interesting ancestor in the book did not turn out to be Stanford White, brilliant architect with a disordered private life ending in murder, but her maternal great grandfather's brother, Archie Chanler.  Both Archie and maternal great grandfather were famous as members of the "Astor Orphans", a group of children raised in a big Hudson mansion named Rokeby, all intelligent, all eccentric, perfect for stories. He married romantic and beautiful Southern belle Amelie Rives, who later became a bestselling author and then ran off with a Russian prince:

 

Archie believed that

...he could change the color of his eyes if he stood looking west out a window at a specified time, holding a pearl stickpin in one hand and looking deeply into a mirror he held in the other.

Nice choice of trick, actually, since almost no one can remember the color of someone else's eyes.

Then he went farther, and became convinced that he could go into a trance and take on the appearance of Napoleon's death mask.  Note, he didn't claim to be Napoleon, just that he could look like Napoleon. And not a living Napoleon.  Dead Napoleon.  Here he is doing the face:

 Looks just like the dear old Emperor, doesn't he? We all have our quirks....

Archie was later institutionalized in New York, escaped, and got declared sane in Virginia, his ex-wife's home state (and thus became famous as the man who was insane in New York, and sane in Virginia), and spent the rest of his life fighting his other siblings over the family money. When one of his brothers married an opera singer, Archie cabled him, "Who's loony now?" which became a universal catchphrase for quite a long while, even serving as the title of a comic strip.

Stanford White was interesting (and a brilliant architect), but my money is on Archie as a novelistic character.  Stay tuned.

 

We've tried bending the healthcare cost curve before

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Pretty much everyone agrees that healthcare costs in the US are out of control, way too high and getting higher. And pretty much everyone agrees that it's someone else's fault.

As nation's get more prosperous, they spend more on healthcare. This is universal, and healthcare costs have been climbing everywhere in the world, no matter what the system of reimbursement or set of controls on use.

But the US is a definite outlier. Its costs are noticably higher than that of other nations, as this graph, from The Incidental Economist, shows:

There are two basic types of solutions, according to The Incidental Economist:

  1. Each of us makes individual choices that lower these costs. We use less, we choose more wisely, we get "skin in the game", we maintain our own health through decent diet and exercise.
  2. The government forces us to use less, by rationing, controlling choices, disallowing certain expensive procedures.

How likely are either of these to happen? We each want others to minimize their healthcare usage, just as we hope other people with cars will stay off the road so we will have a quicker commute. And no one wants actual restrictions imposed on anything except what other people use.

Remember, we did have a successful and effective system of healthcare cost control, back in the 90s. It was called managed care. Remember HMOs? Remember that they controlled healthcare costs? Remember how pissed off everyone got?

Remember movies where desperate men got transplants for their children at gunpoint (2002's John Q), and mothers cursed managed care because their child had asthma (1997's As Good As It Gets--incidentally, the most depressing movie title ever)? These were easy applause lines. Everyone got how awful HMOs were.

It will all happen again, no matter what the reform. Individuals benefit, while the system becomes unsustainable. It would be nice to find a specific villain.  But, while there are always small villains that can be called out and punished, the only big one around is...us.

 

 

 

Spanking Woodrow Wilson

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Pure linkbait, that title. I mean, the guy is so hot right now, his name guarantees an avalanche of visitors.

But what do I say when they get here? That I don't get what's up with Woodrow Wilson? I think liberals try to defend him because he was...well, an intellectual, an Ivy Leaguer with big schemes and an unexpected skill for political infighting.  But his schemes were crazy, he resegregated Federal employment, and he dragged us into a war that there were good reasons for avoiding. Leftists have no reason to love him.

On the other hand, he's not responsible for creating the national state we now have. That was a cooperative effort of many people, on both the right and the left. Rightists just hate his annoying teacher's pet personality.

There's an interesting twist near the end of Robert Heinlein's novel Time Enough For Love, where the hero, Lazarus Long, who has traveled back to the early Twentieth Century to have sex with his mother (it's from that period of Heinlein's writing, so be warned), gets caught by America's entry into WWI because he's not really paying attention. He has every reason to keep out of it, knowing it's going to be a big mistake for everyone, but the women in his life want him to go, so he does.  This is portrayed as somehow heroic, rather than cowardly, at least as I remember it. It certainly isn't one of those books I insisted on keeping in my library for years, so regard this reference as less than dependable. But how can you condemn Wilson's overambitious internationalism without also condemning military interventions in pursuit of national power? (Addendum:  as I should have mentioned, "Lazarus Long" is a nom de methuselah: his birth name was...Woodrow Wilson Smith! Wouldn't a revelation of Heinlein's secret devotion to Woodrow Wilson really cause some trouble?)

Even Gore Vidal, who really should know better, offers a charming portrayal of Wilson in his Hollywood. Given Vidal's political position, Wilson's manipulations and gigantic schemes for reformulating the world should have appalled and disgusted him, but the fact that conservatives have been bashing Wilson since the time of their beloved Teddy Roosevelt (another overweening statist, as it happens) tempted Vidal into defending him--or at least his personal character.

The wise thing is to prefer Presidents who are pragmatists with clear and limited goals to those who are extravant theorists, no matter what their political coloration. To oversimplify, Wilson called Eugene V. Debs a traitor for his words and threw him in jail. Warren G. Harding let him out. Who looks more respectable? And what should that say about their postumous reputations?

 

"It was a dark and stormy night"

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I'm a big fan of the short story writer Ron Carlson.

Yes, I know he writes novels too. I've been hesitant to read them. While some writers do both forms well, it's not as common as you might think. Sprinters don't win marathons. I'll give in eventually and give it a try.

Meanwhile, I just read his Ron Carlson Writes a Story, a short book on writing that does exactly what the title says: it lets you sit next to him at his desk as he writes a story, "The Governor's Ball". That story is clearly a pivotal one for Carlson. His introduction to his combined story collection A Kind of Flying goes through the writing of that story as well, and says it was a start of a new period of productivity for him, writing a new way.

Ron Carlson Writes a Story is charming and quick. What's interesting is that he focuses, not on what makes narrative choices good for a reader, but what makes them good for a writer. He guides the writer in how to set up narrative options, ways of making the story open out rather than close down as you struggle for the next paragraph.

Sometimes when you look at the casing of an electronic device, you think something like "why is that notch there?" The answer is, it is there, not because of some current function, but because the machine stamping it out needed a place to hold it. Same reason your navel has no function. It's an artifact of the manufacturing process (placenta and umbilical).

Carlson doesn't use this metaphor, by the way, so don't blame him for it.

He shows the writer how to make sure narrative choices give you what he calls "inventory": stuff to work with.

Then he quotes another writer, David Boswell.  If I could find the original source, I would go directly to it, but I have been unable to. Perhaps this was what citations call a "personal communication":

The writer David Boswell says it perfectly: "'It was a dark and stormy night,' is not a terrible sentence from a reader's point of view, but it is a terrible sentence for the writer because there's no help in it. 'Lightning struck the fence post' is much better because there's that charred and smoking fence post which I might have to use later." I'm constantly looking for things that are going to help me find the next sentence, survive the story.

In case you got lost in the LISP-like stack of levels that was me quoting Carlson quoting Boswell quoting Bulwer-Lytton's infamous first line of Paul Clifford, so often mocked by the aspiring novelist Snoopy in Peanuts.

It think that is a brilliant bit of advice from Carlson. A writer's goal is to survive the story. Grab whatever will help you do that. You can come back later and edit, but meanwhile, survive is all you can reasonably do.

Close to the end of reading in the garden

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One great use of a garden is for reading, particularly in the afternoon, when the day's work is done (or has been put off).

This year I put a bench in a spot that gets the last afternoon sunlight.

Today I cut it pretty close, but it was warm enough to sit out there even without direct sunlight. Not much of that in the future, though.  Fall is well on its way in New England. Yes, that is a bathtub Mary peeking out from behind the bench. She came with the house, and for quite a while has been in the front yard. I'm redoing that (slowly), but we don't have the heart to completely banish her, so for now, she blesses us from the back corner of the garden.

The book is Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, perhaps the first great global bestseller, and a template for the portrayal of ancient Rome and early Christians on film. I'll write more on it in the future.

When sitting on my bench Monday afternoon (I had Columbus Day off, a rare treat), this was the view to my right:

And this to my left:

These shots are concealing how small my yard really is.  But you can see how autumnal it's becoming.

Green symbols and reality

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"Green" has become a potent symbolic term. But what does it mean? Less carbon for the same output? Less forest harvested, less water polluted, less solid waste produced? A less-damaged web of life, of which we are an integral part?

The word mostly seems to refer to a set of visible practices that announce the practitioner as part of a specific status community. Those outside that status community thus feel it essential to denigrate those same practices as useless or even pernicious, which makes even less sense.

As always, though, the visible practices are just proxies or indicators of the underlying benefits. Thus, if you can achieve the proxy without the underlying benefit, at lesser cost, you are rewarded. This is true whenever you try to incent some complex behavior by picking an indicator. You get more of the indicator, but not necessarily more of the beneficial behavior.

So you get such difficulties as the fact that, in printing, green is an environmentally hazardous color, containing damaging halogens or toxic metal ions. But a green brochure is an indicator of virtue, regardless of the invisible damages.

My local Whole Foods for a while used wood blocks to separate purchases in the checkout line, presumably because oversensitive customers had complained about the plastic ones. I don't recall ever getting splinters from the plastic dividers, but, for a symbol, the wood blocks were startlingly hazardous.  Eventually they disappeared, presumably returned to the wild.

I like to think of myself as relatively green. Once I save a bit of carbon by biking to work and by keeping my thermostat down, I get in an airplane and fly across the country to deposit my bodily waste in environmentally sensitive areas.

I do get some lovely photographs, though.

Failures of mental organization

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When I was younger, weekends were a time for entertainment. I'd hang with friends, go on long bike rides, go to movies (nothing better than a movie in the middle of the day).

Now weekends are when I organize my mind. I write, I consider a prospective novel, I plan career improvements. This, for some reason, takes hours. Slow, methodical hours.

If I miss having that time, as I did while hiking a few weeks ago, my life falls apart. Oh, I get my work done at work, and I fulfill my responsibilities around the house, but my writing career careens off the road and lies upside down in a ditch, wheels slowly spinning.

I don't know why this is.  Sure, work and family take a lot of time and energy, but it doesn't seem that it should require so much direction to keep everything else moving.

But it does. And I know it. Two weekends since I got back from the Wind River Range, and I am only now getting things in order--a book proposal for my agent, a new short story, and some freelance marketing work.

If I work it right, I can keep things going until family holidays disrupt it again. Wish me luck!

What is the real cost of clean energy?

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From yesterday's New York Times, an article titled On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules. Once again, when it comes to clean or green energy, someone is shocked, shocked! to find subsidies going on here.

As far as I can tell, there is no green energy without subsidy. At least right now.  If you dig, you'll find a grant, a tax break, some debt forgiveness: some sort of cash for the implementer that doesn't come from actual project savings. It's all lemonade stand economics. If Mom buys all the ingredients, it isn't that hard to show a profit on sales. And, right now, every form of green energy gets subsidies, whether solar panels, wind turbines, or even insulation.

Now, you'd think, that if it really saved so much money to insulate, or put solar panels on your roof, building owners could run the numbers and make the right decision. The problem is, when you do run the numbers, they don't look as great as you'd like. Returns are small, and take a long time to realize.

Now, just to be clear, I would love to find non-polluting, non-world-destroying sources of energy so that I could continue to live my comfortable lifestyle without occasionally fretting that I'm melting the ice caps or creating sterile deserts where there was once fertile land.

The problem is, I think too much about what's actually going on.  And all the hand-holding-leaf logos in the world aren't going to persuade me that things like electrochromic glass or sedum-covered roofs are actually going to do anything that matters.

If you need a subsidy to get the numbers to come out right, guess what: the numbers don't come out right. If your green project shows a benefit because of a subsidy, that just means that you're burning my money to keep warm, rather than your own.

So the short answer to the title of this post?  We don't know.  As with healthcare, too many people have an interest in making sure the answer is not clear.

Levels of architectural complexity

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One thing modern architecture seems to want to get rid of is texture. All surfaces are supposed to be clean, mathematically precise planes or curves, leading to the suspicion that their highest and best form is as an architectural model peered at from above by clients holding glasses of white wine. The lack of detail at the smaller scales leads to tedium when they are life sized.

Mary and I like the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. This weekend the children (who are less than enthralled) were both otherwise occupied, so we made a trip up there, had breakfast at Red's, and took in maritime art and a few old houses.  Sorry, 'historic" houses.

The museum is the union of two old Salem institutions. When they joined, they hired Moshe Safdie, of nearby Somerville, to build an addition.  Museum additions tend to bring out the worst in architects (cf. the new wing of the MFA, and don't get me started on the hangar being attached to the Gardner), but, in this case, Safdie did a thoughtful job.  The main atrium is actually light and charming, and a great place to drink coffee.  And it gives a view of the five brick houselike structures that house the maritime and special collections.  I'd never looked at them consciously before.

First, I admired the way the sun hit the wall.

Then I started wondering why I was enjoying that so much. I am a man of simple pleasures, but, still, a brick wall.... Then I noticed that there was a lot of detail in the wall.  Not just the sandstone stringcourses, but something about the bricks themselves.

Each brick is different, with a complex surface pattern that casts shadows. I hadn't consciously noticed it, but I certainly had responded to it.

No one two hundred years ago building a Federal style house a few blocks away, in what is now the McIntire Historic District, would ever have allowed such clearly defective bricks in their facades, of course. They were aiming at a smoothness of surface and failing, lacking the technology. We have achieved it, and now should have a better sense of when it makes sense and when it doesn't.

As a writer, I should give you a little lesson about sentences and large scale structures about here, but it is late, and I must get to bed. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

 

 

Philosophical disclaimers

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This week's New Scientist (August 29 - September 3, 2010) notes a road condition disclaimer usage that I too have been amused by: "Icy conditions may exist". Way to take a firm position there, Department of Highways!

It reminds me of my favorite "lost or stolen item" disclaimer, on a coat check rack in a place I no longer remember: "Not responsible for personal loss."

Obviously, these are the result of too-creative responses to the problem of having a warning sign that may or may not be relevant to the actual situation.  Warn of ice in July? List all the things your patrons may lose or have stolen?  It's fear of sounding dumb, which leads to sounding even dumber.

For example, consider the problem of the exit from a long tunnel, where people have put on their headlights.  It may or may not be daylight on the far side.  Do you tell them to turn off their headlights only if it isn't dark?  The solution, I've read, is just one word:  "Lights?" Leave it up to the user.

At work, in the bathroom, is an insultingly detailed discussion of why I should wash my hands after using the toilet.  Now, I appreciate that this is a real hygiene issue:  a physician acquaintance once told me of observers at an infectious disease conference who were startled by how few of the participating physicians washed their hands after using the toilet.  If you want to know how smart doctors really are, just watch their behavior when they aren't pushing you around or giving you useless drugs... On the other hand, don't.  It will just make that health insurance bill even more unbearable.

But as for the sign at my work bathroom:  I'll bet the level of compliance is lower than if the sign just said "Hands washed?" Appeal to my sense of self, not some alleged rational faculty I barely possess, and that I certainly won't activate on your account.

But what communications department is going to leave their work at two words?  Makes you look lazy.  "How much did I end up paying you per word?" So you create a big illustrated poster with a bunch of useless text whose only effect will be irritation.  Believe me:  this is my life.

At least my work life.

Time for Operation Mindrot

Craig Newmark tells the youth of today that competition from earnest Asians will make their lives both mindnumbing and stressful.  He excerpts from Professor Walter Russell Mead, who says, in part

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning.

Bummer!

Both Newmark and Mead think the solution is working even harder than the competition.

Double bummer!

But they ignore a better solution: bringing some joy to the lives of these grinding cubicle dwellers by moving them into our cultural economy more quickly.  Our greatest export products are titillation, distraction, and pointless pleasure. We should work harder only at getting those out across the world, hobbling our competition before it even gets out of bed.  I certainly try to produce as much of it as I can.  Who's with me?

This blog post has been a test of the Emergency Distraction System. If this had been an actual cultural catastrophe, you would have been asked to face the music, and dance.

We now return you to your partial differential equation problem set, already in progress.

And silent it was

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I'm...well, I'm an older person.  My brain formed before any personal form of communication other than a rotary dial wall phone was available, and personal musical entertainment was a portable record player or a transistor radio.  Many people of my vintage are now dependent on a constant drip feed of information, contact, and entertainment, but, somehow, I am not.

So, when I go away on vacation, I go away.  And my children are forced to accompany me, while leaving all their electronics behind as well.  And in the Adirondacks, where we were, you can't even get a cell phone signal, and there are actual telephone booths with pay phones in them.  Amazing!

And I don't miss any of it.  That, of course, puts me out of step with pretty much everyone else.  I like quiet and stillness.  I like to sit and read.  In the early morning I write novel notes in a spiral notebook.  I do jigsaw puzzles with my children. Since our usual family media diet is fairly sparse to begin with, they deal with it.  We do have electricity.  And hot water.  I also make them climb mountains and paddle canoes across lakes.  Classic dad, I am.  I can just hear the eulogies.  They'll be sorry then....

The fundamental problem is that my brain is really really slow.  Despite my lack of distractions, I get little done on any given day.  So don't think I'm virtuous, and have one up on you.  You can probably write your tweets, watch videos, track your stocks, update your Facebook status, and still get more of your novel done than me.  And good for you.

Now, if you'l excuse me, I really should get something done....

 

Doored!

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Urban bicyclists don't fear moving cars that much. There might be the occasional lunatic tearing unexpectedly across an intersection, but mostly they are pretty predictable. Despite their poor reputation, I've found Boston-area drivers to be fairly courteous and flexible (except for the occasional pickup truck, for reasons that still mystify me).

No, what we fear is what I encountered today: the swinging open car door. That can take you out instantly, and if it pushes you out into traffic, can kill you. It's hard to predict, and maneuvering around it can be almost as dangerous as hitting it.

I was on my way to work. I know the pattern of lights on the hill down toward the Charles and the Science Museum on Cambridge Street in Cambridge, so I had timed my approach down the hill for the extremely short green at First Avenue.  I saw the seconds counting down on the pedestrian signal. As it hit zero, I pushed forward along the line of cars that was about to start, keeping half an eye out for anyone who might go suddenly right, across my path. But I was going pretty fast, about the fastest of the entire ride.

A passenger, opening her door and jumping out just as the cars started, hit me like a baseball bat across the forehead.  I smashed into the end of the door and went down instantly, face planting on the pavement. Once I realized I could move, and wasn't lying in a pool of my own blood, I jumped up, and may have uttered a few oaths.

The woman who had taken me out was apologetic. What could I do? My cheek was cut, my prescription sunglasses scraped up and pushed into my face. I got her contact information, but was not sympathetic to her apologies. We've all opened our door without looking, but...Jesus, she could have killed me. I was in a bike lane, I had the green light: rarely am I so virtuously in the right.

Seven stitches and a tetanus shot later, I was in my office.  I should have been home in bed, because the shock had me quite shaky. But I have a week's vacation coming up, and a lot to make sure gets done before I go.

It certainly could have been worse. I'm an aging bag of bones, and don't bounce like I used to.  I'll see how black and blue I am tomorrow, but I think I escaped more serious consequences than a potential GI Joe scar on my right cheek.

It's those passenger doors that are the most dangerous. I regularly scan parked cars for heads.  But I just don't have the bandwidth to keep my eye on passenger-side doors too. Cars in the street naturally have heads in them, so it's impossible to filter. So, please, car passengers who get out in the middle of the freaking street. Give a mind to who you can kill, particularly in a busy biking city like Cambrige, and give a quick look before you swing.

Foundational military read: "How the North Won", Hattaway and Jones

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Sometimes I read military history books for the story (and the interesting odd facts).  Sometimes, though, I find one that examines and clarifies the underlying motivations and causes for the surface events that I find so engaging.

How the North Won, by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, is the book for someone of non-military background who is interested in the Civil War, but is not a buff.  Buffs read (and own) books about specific units, can talk calibers and muzzle velocities, and can tell instantly that the illustration of the private in the Clinch Rifles is wearing a piece of trim issued only the following year.  People interested in history, but not the Civil War in particular, know the high points, but don't care about the details of military strategy.

I'm in the middle (as I am in many things). The first thing about the Civil War is that it was a war, a bloody one between two determined opponents. How did they fight it? What problems did they face?

While the North had the resources, it had by far the tougher job:  conquering and subduing the hostile and violently resisting South. It proved impossible to conquer and hold territory--that took more troops than the North could possibly raise (even after it finally instituted a draft, and thus faced violent resistance from urban mobs). Hattaway and Jones are extremely clear on the war in the West. As long as they could move along the rivers, they could penetrate South.  When the rivers turned the wrong way, they had to move by land.  Their supply lines were constantly harassed and raided.

And armies need to be supplied. These are tens of thousands of active men. Think about this: when McClellan's 1862 Army of the Potomac was standing still, it was the second-largest city in the South, after New Orleans. An army in one place for a few days devoured the countryside around it. When it moved, it pulled supply lines after it.

Without access to the rivers, it was impossible to progress.  A raid at Grant's supply base at Holly Springs delayed his attack on Vicksburg by months. Grant only took Vicksburg by cutting himself loose from his supply lines and moving across a springtime forage-covered countryside that had not had to support an army.

Incidentally, this need for springtime forage accounts for the seemingly late timing of both Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia (the 1941 Wermacht was still largely a horse-drawn force, with mechanized forces used only over short distances): they needed to feed their horses, or be stranded.

And Civil War armies, armed with accurate long-range rifles, were like porcupines, almost impossible to get at and kill.  They could be defeated, but then would retreat, falling back on their own supply lines and leaving a devastated country for the pursuing army to pass through.  Even Lee after Fredericksburg did not pursue the savagely defeated Burnside. Decisive battle proved impossible, though it was constantly demanded by the childish and pathetically self-deluded populations of the respective regions.

Grant took what he had learned in the West and applied it when he came East: his war was a series of raids, not invasions. Even the bloody Overland Campaign was supposed to hold Lee's forces in place while raids did their work elsewhere. Sherman's raid on Atlanta, and then to the sea and up into South Carolina, succeeded, while the others (Butler, Sigel, Banks) all failed. And Grant was only fighting Lee in northern Virginia because it was politically impossible not to--he would much have preferred fighting almost anywhere else.

How the North Won also has sharp schematic maps with just enough detail to show interior lines and turning movements, with good explanations for the non-buff of how all that worked.

If you are interested in the military side of the Civil War, and already have a good sense of the sequence of events, you will find enlightenment in this book.  You'll understand why things that seem like they should have been easy, weren't. You'll gain an appreciation for mud. You'll even have some sympathy for McClellan and Halleck, two men who usually get little of it. Solutions are only obvious afterward, and the price Grant paid for his was strikingly high.

How the North Won
Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones