Studying geology

One science I've never really studied is geology. I developed an interest in it when I started hiking the Colorado Plateau area a couple of decades ago. So I can kind of pretend to knowledge about things like Navajo sandstone (a dramatic cliff-forming layer you see in the Escalante region and in Zion), while not actually understanding too much.

This last trip, we hiked Yellowstone and the Tetons, and one of my friends asked me a question about the geology that I could not answer. I did then get a book on the geology of the region, but also resolved to learn more about it in general.

So I turned to my old source, The Teaching Company, which is clearly trying to rebrand itself as The Great Courses.  I'm currently watching and enjoying an introductory geology class, Nature of Earth. I now know something about the nine kinds of silicates that make up igneous rock, about oceanic basalt and continental granite, and the chemical reactions that lead to clays.  The professor, John J. Renton, has the glasses, moustache, and plain demeanor you would want from a geologist, though he actually started as a chemist.

All my the last part of my life is going to be devoted to is filling the gaps left by the first part.

Waterfalls, geysers, and bears, oh my!

For the next week, I will be hiking the backcountry of Yellowstone, looking at geysers and waterfalls and evading grizzly bears.  The mosquitoes are supposed to be horrendous this year, because of the high snowpack and resulting wetness.  That's probably my least favorite camping experience.  I tend to try to hike later in the year, trading cold and long nights for days with no bugs.  Didn't fit in with my hiking partners' schedules this time.

Be back next week.

Does obesity keep us safe?

Several times on this blog I have wondered why crime rates have fallen, and talked about how little we really do understand about historical causation, even about events that are readily visible, with a lot of data.  The current riots in the UK would qualify as well. Those are on video, are extensively covered and investigated, and no one seems to have any real idea of what is causing those events.

But I have a possible explanation for the larger secular trend in falling crime rates: we are being protected by higher obesity. Or, at least, the two events are not separate, but are somehow related.

What? Of course I haven't actually run the numbers! Do you really want me to take grants from the mouths of deserving graduate students?

But think about these two large, visible, and inexplicable trends.  Crime has steadily dropped over the past two decades. Obesity has just as steadily risen. Coincidence?  I don't think so!

Does a packing a little extra weight make you just that much less likely to go out and commit a physically challenging violent crime? Or, maybe, does the same thing that make you fat make you less violent? This could be sitting around and playing violent video games while eating snack food. You're not out committing real crimes, and you're getting fat. Getting kids out for healthy outdoor exercise might be the worst thing we could do for our own safety.

Is the weight gain among the key crime-committing demographic, young males, correlated with decreased crime?  Come on, grant-seeking grad students. Step up to the plate.

Meanwhile, I will continue to indulge in unrestrained speculation, unhandicapped by having to run nasty regressions on piles of recalcitrant data.

The "committed" auteur: Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor

I'm toying with a horror novel set in an abandoned insane asylum. Nothing unusual here, certainly, but I think it might be fun.

Part of the backstory is someone who had himself voluntarily committed to investigate something of what was going on at the asylum while it was functioning, events that play a role in the present.

In the spirit of research, I rented Samuel Fuller's movie Shock Corridor (1963), about a reporter who commits himself to a mental hospital to find out who committed a murder there.

What a terrible movie! Fuller wrote, produced, and directed. Whatever the merits of his direction (hint: minimal), the writing, at least, is wretched: overblown, repetitive, and rambling. It really plays as if he just wrote it once, a few days before filming, and then never read it again, and just handed out the shooting scripts to the bemused and long-suffering actors.

The story is about a man, Johnny Barrett, who goes into an asylum and there becomes mad. Fine. But the first ten minutes or so involve his girlfriend, stripper named Cathy, with the austere face and demeanor of a nun in a particularly restrictive order, who tells him that this is dangerous, and that if he goes in there, he will lose his mind. Then we see her sing and do a woodenly choreographed striptease. The rest of her scenes involve her telling Johnny's editor that Johnny will lose his mind, or telling Johnny on visiting day that he will lose his mind...her scenes take up about a third of the movie, have no connection to anything, and never pay off in any way. Except that he actually does lose his mind. She was right!

About a third of the way into the movie, we finally figure out that Johnny is there to investigate the stabbing of a man named Sloane. Who Sloane was, why he was killed, what the consequences were, who might have wanted to kill him...to Fuller these are tedious irrelevancies.  What he really wants to do is let a few actors rant about modern societal issues, have a moment of clarity where they remember something about the stabbing of Sloane, and then have big breakdown.  This is definitely one of the times where the term "cult" actually means "lame".

In addition to wasting time with Cathy, Fuller sticks in some color sections from failed movie projects, trying to amortize their cost by labeling them as memories or dream sequences. At one point, a character actually remarks how odd it is that his memories are in color, presumably because he knows he's actually B&W. The silliest of these is where a black character remembers being a Brazilian Indian, presumably because those were the darkest-skinned people Fuller had footage of.

As usual, I thought about many different ways this story could go. Obviously figuring out the stabbing would be just the start--why the stabbing happened is the interesting thing. Cathy only makes sense if she has her own game to play, either encouraging madness on the part of her fiance, or facing a threat while Johnny is incarcerated, or finding clues at the strip joint that connect up with Johnny's investigation--clues Johnny rejects. What seems to be irrelevant "thematic" rambling by the various madmen would actually conceal useful information, information Johnny doesn't see because he is obsessed with only one question, that about the stabbing.

So it was useful for me to see, because it gave me a lot of ideas, as failed movies often do. You might want to see it as a sociological document, or as a desperately ridiculous failure, or as an example of what a total farce auteur theory turned out to be. Just don't see it because you think it will be fun to watch.

Effective reading level = native reading level/attention

That's the equation I use to guide my thinking, and that of clients, when deciding on how simple and short a piece of marketing text should be. The "equation" part is actually a bit of an overclaim, because I don't have any real numbers with which to calculate. And I suppose it should really be divided by "inattention".

But what I mean is, people aren't paying attention, particularly not to your extremely urgent marketing message. So even if they read at a post-graduate level when they are paying full attention, they read like a fifth grader when it comes to figuring out what you are saying. So you need to use the attention they have most effectively.

I love a long sentence with multiple clauses. But not when I'm trying to decide between two cell phone plans, or looking at a brochure for a product I'm not sure I'm interested in.

So, when writing a marketing piece, keep in mind the effective reading level of your audience.  If they're primed and attentive, say because they are at the point when they are comparing specs and performance for a purchase decision, you can get complicated. If you're trying to best use a tiny bit of available attention, go simple.

You can't know what to do if you don't know what you're doing

Sometimes I listen to fellow writers and other artists talk about what they want to do with a certain project. They want to finish a book, or write a magazine article, or figure out a way to do their art more.

Often I find out that they have been worrying this particular bone for years. They've started and stopped. Everyone loved the pieces they have managed to get done, and so now they want to talk about whether they should do more, and if so, what the best next step would be....

I suppose I have been this way myself. Doing something time-consuming and demanding that no one else cares a bit about is difficult. So the urge is to spend even more time and effort avoiding doing it.

The solution is obvious, and sometimes often impossible: just do it. Pick a target, a goal, a task, and start doing it. Even if you throw away most of what you do, you have more than you would have if you didn't do it. And given how much of any given day most of us waste by checking our email, watching TV, trying to choose between two brands of canned artichoke hearts, or looking an Amazon for books we might like to read on a certain topic, it's not like you'll be crowding out anything important.

Your actions must be concrete, at least in the sense that you can picture yourself doing them.  And you know your weaknesses.  No, really, you do. You know if you spend time collating research to avoid doing work. You know if you obsessively rewrite the first three chapters instead of moving forward. You know if you come up with much-more-interesting potential opportunities every time the work gets hard. You know what keeps you from moving forward.

So you know what to avoid if you want to get to something.

Pick a spot on the endless blank wall of uncreated art and hit your forehead against it. Do it again. Stay on the spot, pounding your head against it. Eventually the wall will crack.

I can't actually promise much more than that, but once that crack is there, you have something to work with. The people I listen to spend their time worrying about finding the right spot on the wall. There is no right spot on the wall. You create that spot...with your forehead.

Don't come back to me until you have a headache.

The thoughtful gaze in book covers

My recent reading has included Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman and P.D. James's The Skull Beneath the Skin (mentioned a few days ago).  I noticed that the book covers had a similar thematic structure:

A woman with an side and upward thoughtful or abstracted gaze, accompanied by some symbolic background, the James from 1987 (though the design is probably from 1983), the Kirstein from 2003. Would anyone use this style for a male character? I think it conveys thoughtfulness, but a bit of distance. This woman is interested in figuring something out and is probably not that easy to get to know.

Just an interesting coincidence, of no real significance.

Why there's no such thing as marketer's block

I write for a living. Mornings, I work on my fiction--right now, a YA novel about teens discovering the existence of alternate realities.  The rest of the day, I write marketing pieces. For now, I have a steady contract with a place that provides information on the medical device market.

A writer can get writer's block. A marketing writer cannot get marketer's block. Sure, a day or so might go by when you have trouble organizing your thoughts and tasks, but it better not go on much longer than that. Because your clients kinda notice that.  You have press releases every week, pieces to go out, edits to respond to....

It's useful to take the mindset and move it to the fiction. It's a job, after all. A job I chose, a job no one needs for me to do. But a job.

So, if you're a writer and wondering whether a day job writing would use up fiction resources, don't worry. It may take some energy, but the skills you learn can be immensely useful.

My crush on Cordelia Gray

Cordelia Gray was a detective PD James wrote about in the 70s and early 80s. James seemed to be experimenting with breaking away from her elegant, self-contained series detective Dalgliesh (though Dalgliesh plays a bit part in the first Cordelia Gray book).

But it never worked out. James wrote two Cordelia Gray books, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and the much longer The Skull Beneath the Skin. It must have seemed like a good idea, creating a young, spunky woman with a detective agency mostly specializing in lost pets, who gets involved in murder.

James's heart never really seemed to be in it. She discovered that a private eye has few resources for actually solving crimes. Much of the post-murder part of Skull is told from the point of view of cops (anonymous, though extensively described), though Cordelia is eventually the one to figure out who the killer is. James was a professional administrator and bureaucrat, and her heart is with systems. Dalgliesh is a man of system. Cordelia was on her own, and, in the end, I don't think James could come up with plots that worked with that situation.

The stress shows in Skull. All the characters are more schematic than James's usual, despite the length of the book.  It lacks the easy charm of the first Cordelia book, Unsuitable Job.

Plus, Cordelia was kind of Dalgliesh's little sister (though there were hints of a potential romance betweent them). She had the same self-sufficient personality, the same literary education, the same cool attractiveness. James hadn't really traveled very far, and so decided to just go with Dalgliesh, the original model.

Sometimes, as a writer, you try to break free, only to find that your restrictions are also your strengths.

I miss Cordelia, though.  Maybe because I can't work up a crush on the dark-and-literary Dalgliesh, but have no problem doing so for the catlike Cordelia.

The resurgence of Unspiek, Baron Bodissey

One of the startling things to come out of the mass murder in Norway is that a source for the killer's manifestos was a blogger who writes under the name of "Baron Bodissey".

This is insider baseball indeed, akin to naming a housing development Undle Square. "Baron Bodissey" provides the epigraphs to various chapters in the works of Jack Vance, most particularly the Demon Princes novels.  The first two of those, The Star King and The Killing Machine, were particular favorites of mine in my youth. Given the Baron's pompous, elephant-picking-up-a-pea style, he seems an odd choice for someone supposedly providing real political commentary.

But, behind his own light and frothy style, Vance often engaged in fictional mass murder and even genocide--the event that starts the long vengeance of Kirth Gersen in the Demon Princes novels is, after all, the Mount Pleasant Massacre. So perhaps this points a way to seeing the way style can direct the uninformed eye away from content.

Like anyone else, the Baron has a Wikipedia page.

No one wants to throw away information: the case of the SATs

A couple of days ago, the Boston Globe had an interesting story: Colleges drop SAT, but still buy names of high-scoring students.

It seems that even colleges that have, with high PR and visibility, dispensed with using SATs as a criterion for admission, quietly pay College Board, the owner of the SATs, for the names of students who have done well on the test, in order to recruit them.

Why, if the tests are meaningless?

Because, of course, the tests aren't meaningless. They just give results that people don't like. They aren't perfect, at least in the sense that they absolutely predict academic success, but they remain one of the few pieces of unmanipulated information available. Everything else, from grades to recommendations, are spun, manipulated, and gamed in pursuit of an image a large number of people have agreed to pretend is the one that actually exists. But when someone sits down with a sheet covered with those little fill-in ellipses, and starts doing a math problem, they are alone. There is no one there to put a thumb on the scales.

Not-perfect information trumps no information every time. Information is seldom perfect.  So it's no wonder college admissions offices want to use the metric they know is correlated with decent academic performance. Too bad they try to pretend they are doing something else.

This is exactly the kind of thing that irritates high-SAT-scoring science fiction fans.  They are smart, and want people to know it. And they know that, when it comes to massaging appearances, they are the ones who would have lost out.  I would bet that even science fiction fans who are political liberals would tend to be more pro-SAT than their political affiliation would suggest.

I don't know if they still have the old analogy section (long time since my last SAT). That's exactly where any SF fan would shine. After all, that's the entire basis of our literature.

Alcoholic loners and parentless children

Hard-boiled detective novels and police procedurals rely on alcoholic divorced men who are hard to get along with, obsessed, and have some specific taste, like jazz or late-Medieval altarpieces. Books and movies that have adolescents as protagonists have usually killed the parents off.

These are not "content" choices.  That is, the writers of these novels don't actually favor alcoholic loners or dead parents in some abstract sense. They make these choices for mechanical reasons. They make the books easier to write.

The divorce and hostility eliminate tiresome spouses, children, and friends.  If the cop had those, they would have to appear in the story. If they appear in the story, you then have to have a psycho threaten them or kidnap them, and that's not appropriate to every story, and certainly not for a series. Otherwise the family just takes up time for no purpose.

Non-hardboiled detective books can certainly allow spouses, as in Rendell's Inspector Wexford books, or Reginal Hill's Dalziel/Pascoe books. There, spousal life serves as counterpoint to the relationship-oriented crimes.

But that's "literary", death in a more bare-knuckle book.  What about the alcohol and the outré hobby? Just as overprocessed grain products will be "fortified" with vitamins and minerals, these are ways of adding back in the personality that got milled out during plot creation.

This is on my mind now, because I am writing a novel with adolescent protagonists, what is known in the trade as YA: Young Adult (working title: Timeslip). It involves travel between alternate universes. And the parents are still alive.

How can my character, Doug, and his two friends go on a rescue mission to an alternate world where the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot? What parent would allow that?  And how can they be back before curfew?

I did have to incapacitate Doug's parents in certain plot-significant ways. But what about the parents/guardians of the other adolescent characters?  I'm the parent of an adolescent. I'm sure I don't know everything he does, but he gets in trouble if he's home late, or goes somewhere unusual without telling us. Now, my son claims that the parents of his friends aren't concerned about these things, so maybe those kids get to travel to worlds with steam carriages and spend several days there with no difficulty.  Somehow I doubt it.

Now, in an extraliterary way, you know something of the arguments we have around our house. Without the steam carriages, unfortunately.

Anyway, it has been an adventure, maneuvering the plot while not eliminating the parents. Do I get points for degree of difficulty?  And do my proposed adolescent readers even see this as positive? Maybe, like many kids that age, they wish their parents dead or vanished anyway.

I just found it too often the default position, and thought I'd give it a shot. 

Why I've never moved back to Chicago

I grew up near Chicago. In the suburbs, to be clear, one called LaGrange Park.

I went away to college, and never moved back.  Mary, who grew up near Toledo, sometimes agitates for us to move to Chicago. We both love the city, and could easily move to some hip area like Bucktown. Or, at least, so we would like to think. When I visit my brother Pete, who lives in Evanston, we often spend a day walking through the city, looking at buildings and stopping in at bars. The city of Chicago has some of the best urban structures in the world.

But a city isn't just its urban core.  It's everything around it, the whole vast metro area.  Chicago has one of the vastest metro areas in the country, and, not to put too fine a point on it, it sucks.  According to the linked newgeography article, it is the third largest urban agglomeration in the world, after Tokyo and New York. It is less dense than Los Angeles.

Aside from Lake Michigan to the east, there is nothing to block its growth.  The land is flat and easily dug, and the lake supplies an increasingly rare resource, one that will eventually be the limiting factor in urban development worldwide: fresh water.  The buildings range from undistinguished to ugly and the distribution is almost entire automobile oriented. And--not the fault of development--there really aren't many scenic features. Exactly what made it great farming country makes it uninteresting to look at.

The great thing about the Boston metro area is that you can leave it, and pretty fast.  And the areas around it vary. Going up the rocky North Shore is noticeably different than traveling through the glacial outwash plain to the south, or the hills to the west. Snooty zoning restrictions  in older towns keep me from ever being able to afford a house there, if that was the life I wanted, but provide me with picturesque landscape to bicycle through.

I keep seeing articles about the new urbanism, and people moving back to the urban cores. I have no idea what world they're talking about. What's needed is a New Suburbanism, since that's where almost everyone in the world will eventually live.

So despite the fact that Chicago bars are some of the best in the country, I'm going to remain a visitor. And I think people who live there will be sorry someday about the choices they made without even knowing they were making them.

Readercon wrap up

Readercon is my favorite local con...actually, that makes it my favorite con, because I rarely travel to go to conventions that require travel, and staying at the hotel. I have a limited tolerance for fluorescent-lit, over-air-conditioned hotels and meeting rooms. Readercon tends to happen on a beautiful summer weekend, which this one certainly was. That makes staying inside even more difficult.

On Thursday, I was on a panel called How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction created by Barbara Krasnoff. Barbara has hosted this panel topic a number of times, and says she gets very different discussions every time. I got to sit next to my friend Elaine Isaak and talked about my marketing copywriting business. It's not an easy subject--there are a lot of possibilities, but most of them demand a degree of hustle and job search that is too stressful for most people.  I know it is sometimes too stressful for me, satisfying though this way of making a living can be.

Then I went to a reading by my friend John Kessel, from a novel he's working on. It is set in the same Lunar world as some of his recent stories, including "Stories for Men". Afterward, John and I had a beer in the bar, which had hired a singer to entertain on what was supposed to be a slow night. John and I yelled at each other over the noise music. Eric Van later joined us. Unfortunately, that was the last time I talked to John during the con, though I saw him several more times.

On Friday I had a reading.  No one showed up.  I should have mentioned that it was my alien sex story, coming out in F&SF.  It's funny, and I was looking forward to performing it.

I had beers and food with my good friends Paul Di Filippo and Deb Newton, as well as John Crowley and Paul Witcover, and several others.  So, you see, I sometimes travel in exalted circles indeed.

Friday night was the Meet the Prose party, an Readercon tradition.  I caught up with several people, including Judith Berman (warning: she has not posted recently, and her site seems to have been taken over by an Italian journalist of the same name).  I didn't see Judith again either.

On Saturday and Sunday I got together a couple of times with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Geary Gravel, and Rosemary Kirstein.  Ann and Rosemary I got to see at Boskone earlier this year, but Geary I have not seen in a long time.  We all make up a kind of Coalition of the Unappreciated, and so can commiserate with each other without fear.

Saturday night my neighbor Athena Andreadis had me over to dinner with Joan Slonczewski and Anil Menon, both of whom I enjoyed meeting, along with Athena's partner, Peter.

I also got to see Walter H. Hunt, Greg Feeley (whose great blog has not been updated in quite some time), Vandana Singh, and Madeleine Robins.

If I skipped you or forgot your name, please forgive me.

Greece and debt ceilings: the normalization of deviance

Like most other people, I am watching with bewildered apprehension as our fragile economic recovery faces incredible, if hard-for-me-to-understand challenges. Greece threatens to default on its debts, peeling off its rock face and dragging the linked rock climbers of the Eurozone down into the abyss.  All their chock stones have long since slipped out, and their fingers are getting tired....

The Eurozone was set up by people who told everyone they were really smart. I never got what big advantages the Euro was supposed to bring to people, but I'm not a politician. The system was set up with certain rules about debt and spending that were supposed to make it safe. Then they started violating those rules. Nothing bad happened. So they let things slip a bit more.

Meanwhile, here in the US, everyone is playing chicken with the debt limit.  The S&P 500 doesn't seem to even remotely reflect the terrifying possibilities. It seems routine, just another bit of partisan game playing. Stuff like this happens all the time.

This is the result of what Dianne Vaughan, in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, called "normalization of deviance". You get used to violating tedious and annoying safety precautions. Nothing happens, because safety events are rare. So you violate them more, and start ignoring important procedures. Nothing happens for a long time. You relax. This is great. You have a lot more free time than you thought. Stupid rulebooks. What do those guys know?

Then the crisis strikes. Your reactor gets hit by a tsunami. Your shuttle blows up. People lose their jobs, their savings, their support from their government.  We're supposed to be smarter than that. But, of course, we were smarter than that in 2007.  And in 2001. We still bought houses or pets.com.

It's hard for science fiction to catch this kind of thing. SF is about smart people. And smartness is defined as acting on events in such a way that they change in a favorable direction, and then detecting and feeling proud of that change.  If you are a smart individual, what do you do now? Sell all your stocks and make sure you have enough bottled water? Chain yourself to your Representative's desk until he or she helps in a solution? Write a sternly worded blog post?

I live in a science fictional universe, but am not a science fictional hero. I don't know.

My Readercon schedule

As usual, I was insufficiently enthusiastic in my responses to Readercon's complex panel signup process, and only got one panel--on Thursday, tonight, before the convention even starts. The signup has you rate panels by A+, A, B, and I get the impression that a lot of writers who are savvier than me say A+ to everything they have even the slightest interest in. In my initial run through, I was honest...and then forgot to go back and inflate my scores.

And I knew I had to do that. This happened last year too.

Of course, unlike most conventions, where anyone can gas on about almost anything, Readercon panels tend to require actual knowledge if you are not to make a fool of yourself, and waste the audience's time.

My obvious ignorance is not the reason I did not get on any panels!  That is not the explanation! So don't write and tell me so.

Please.

I do have a couple of other events that don't rely on my knowing anything except my name, and what I have written.

If you want to catch me, here is my schedule:

Thursday July 14

8:00 PM    ME    How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction. Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Barbara Krasnoff (leader), John Edward Lawson, Terry McGarry. You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.

Friday July 15

1:30 PM    VT    Reading. Alexander Jablokov. Jablokov reads from The Comfort of Strangers.

This is an alien sex story. Nothing too graphic, but consider your sensibilities before attending.

Saturday July 16

10:00 AM    Vin.    Kaffeeklatsch. David G. Hartwell, Alexander Jablokov.

David has been editor for most of my books. And, surprisingly, after the miserable sales figures for Brain Thief, he still talks to me!  We're actually just at the same time, not together, but there may be some overlap as a result.

Sunday July 17

11:00 AM    E    Autographs. Walter H. Hunt, Alexander Jablokov, Rosemary Kirstein.

I got lucky, and am autographing with two people I know and like.  Because we'll have plenty of time to talk!

12:00 PM    NH    Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop group reading. F. Brett Cox, Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer. Members of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop read selections from their work.

This is the spot for short-shorts, which I seldom write.  But I do have one I wrot a long time ago, which I wil have to remember to pull out.

Tough clueless cop: Nesbo's Redbreast

Scandinavian mysteries had been on a roll recently, and so I have read a few. Recently I read a book by the hot-even-by-Scandinavian-standards Jo Nesbo, The Redbreast, with his detective Harry Hole. As the works of Sieg Larssen show, these writers are all courageous enough to grit their teeth and finally admit that they dislike Nazis. Very daring of them.

The Redbreast actually has real Norwegian fascists fighting the Soviets in WWII.  In the modern day, Hole pursues one of those soldiers, as he bumps off a bunch of people in pursuit of...well, there's no reason to tell you, although I guarantee you will find his goal odd.

What's particularly odd, though, is how incompetent Hole and his fellow cops are. After an early scene where he demonstrates his knowledge and deductive skill by describing what someone must have done with a gun, he pretty much goes to sleep and gets whacked around the rest of the novel like a pinball. He never figures anything out, and never really understands anything.

Despite this, it was a fun book to read--a page turner, as they say. So Nesbo has a gift for promising things--he just doesn't have as much of a gift for delivering them.

Now, I don't need my detective to be Sherlock Holmes, but I do think I deserve one with a bit more on the ball than Hole has. Nesbo is also frustrating because he raises issues, like a juicy case of sexual blackmail by a character close to the case, which gets terminated quite unsatisfactorily, at least for me.

It's instructive for me, since I sometimes think about writing a mystery. You can get away with a lot if each individual scene is suspenseful and exciting, even if the scenes, taken together, don't make a tremendous amount of sense.

Book review: Death at the Crossroads

I love reading mystery novels. Someday I would like to write one myself.

There is a handicap. Not only can't I think like a mystery, I never figure out who did it in the books I read. Actually, I seldom even care. Since mystery novels are about restoring the damaged world, you'd think I would.

Maybe it's because I see mystery novels, or at least the kind I like to read, as a way of investigating a world, a milieu, a culture. What is important to me is not the structure of deceit and justice, but the revelation of character and relationship that comes from the impact of the crime. People's world is disrupted, someone digs through their lives, and everyone behaves more dramatically than they perhaps otherwise would. In disrupting the structure of life, the crime reveals more about that structure than any other approach could.

So didn't mind (much) that the samurai detective in Dale Furutani's Death at the Crossroads doesn't really do much detection. Furutani uses the crime, the discovery of the body of an anonymous merchant found at the crossroads with an arrow in his back, as a way of investigating the tensions in early Tokugawa Japan. There are some entertaining characters, clever stratagems, and an underlying sense of growing oppression as the new regime, which will rule Japan for the next two and a half centuries, tightens its grip.  The detective is a ronin, a masterless samurai, who happens on this crime while pursuing a larger mission, trying to find a lost girl. He is alone, his world and structure of loyalties destroyed.

It's light, quick, and deft.  There are two more books after this one, where the ronin pursues his mission, and I will seek them out.

2011's most irritating word combination: "controversial tweet"

If you scan headlines on something like HuffPo, you eventually find some kerfuffle about something someone tweeted, about a car accident, or sex, or race, or some other topic that usually takes more than 140 characters to express yourself about. People respond that they are hurt, or offended, or enraged. Apologies are tendered, careers disturbed or ruined, commentary follows.

Of course, it doesn't take an actual tweet.  Lazar Greenfield had to resign from the presidency of The American College of Surgeons because of a joke about semen he made in an editorial.

Now, sometimes the tweet or statement is the issue, and sometimes it's just the excuse. It looks to me like people were gunning for Greenfield, as they were gunning for Larry Summers when he was president of Harvard. So what looks like "controversy" is really the public manifestation of a concealed power struggle.  I'm just guessing about Greenfield, but that was clearly what happened to Summers.

But usually they are completely without reason or consequence. People like these things. They are like mini speculative bubbles. Everyone can get involved, generate comments, and read what everyone else thinks. The topic seems more and more important. The bubble swells up then pops in a matter of days. No one loses their retirement fund or their house, but it's a bit of the same thrill of simultaneously making a mistake with a whole lot of people you don't know.

I still think "controversial tweet" is dumb, but then, I rarely change stock positions and have owned a house for years without ever feeling the urge to pull any money out of it, so I'm scarcely representative.