Today's lockdown: have we given something up by assenting?

This morning, as I was getting ready to get on my bike to go to work, I got a robocall from the City of Cambridge. It told me to stay home today. There had been gunfire, and a suspect from the Boston Marathon bombing was being hunted. I don't remember if the message used the phrase "shelter in place", previously unknown to me but now utterly familiar.

I let my coworkers know that I would be working from home today, and went to check out what was going on.  There were a lot of updates, serious-looking police telling me to stay in my house, and helicopters and Humvees. Later, the governor closed down Boston as well. Pictures of normally busy intersections devoid of people and cars proliferated.

As far as I know, what happened is a couple of guys set off bombs at a popular event, killing three people and injuring a number more. Later, they robbed a convenience store, killed a security guard, and got into a gunfight with some cops. One was killed, the other fled, and may or may not be under siege in Watertown, the next town over from Cambridge.

That's all bad. But is it bad enough to shut down an entire metropolitan area? The immediate area of anything going on, sure. Even a fairly large area.  But all of Boston? Bombings are not unusual in American history, including Haymarket in 1887, Wall Street in 1920, LaGuardia in 1975. Bombs are relatively easy to make and hard to protect against. Ditto guns and other weapons.  What makes this situation different enough to require this level of response?

Smart, dedicated people can cause a lot of damage if they want to. They can kill people, sometimes a lot of people. But their danger is limited to what they themselves can do. They are not all-powerful. Now, I might not know things. There might be evidence of a much larger conspiracy. We might all actually be in danger.

Or this could be ass-covering security kabuki writ large. If so, I'm going to be irritated. To be clear: I am not minimizing the danger to the police and other forces pursuing a dangerous fugitive. But proportionality is important. Otherwise I should just huddle in my basement and never leave.

Two forces are at play here, I think. One is just the sheer mass of information, useful, useless, and misleading, that pours out of our communication devices. The other is the increasing power of the security state, which accurately represents our own willingness to trade freedom for some perceived safety.  Together, they allow a couple of killers to hold an entire city hostage.

If I had just ignored the shelter order, what would the consequences have been? Could I have been restrained in some way? It is genuinely astonishing that places like Downtown Crossing and Harvard Square were completely empty just because authorities told us we needed to stay home.

Again, as I said, it might have actually been necessary. I would not have wanted to get in the way of some essential operation.  But, as you can tell, I have my doubts. Someone is going to have to explain this to me.

The rise of the obsessive redhead

Mary and I have been watching the the AMC series The Killing. We tend to have different viewing habits, but we're both enjoying it a lot.

One thing struck me with the first episode, though: the uptight, withholding, driven, duty-focused redheaded homicide cop Sarah Linden (played by Mireille Enos) seems like exactly the same character as the uptight, driven, etc. redheaded CIA agent Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) in Zero Dark Thirty. Is this some kind of "leaning in" cultural stereotype in the making? And who is going to direct Legally Blunt?

Sarah Linden does have a son, and seems to occasionally have relationships, sexual and otherwise, unlike Maya. She also has a last name.  But there is a more important difference between the two.

Sarah Linden is sometimes wrong. She'll even admit it. Maya is never wrong. Sarah may destroy herself. but Maya will someday be responsible for an incredible disaster--and that story is one I think I will try to write, because Maya was one of the most annoying and dishonest and potentially fascinating characters I have seen in a while. She deserves to be freed of the frame she had to fit for the movie.

But two redheads don't make a trend.  If we spot a third one, I can say you heard it here first.

Invisible infrastructure

Yesterday I got a notice from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority about a bunch of work underway in my area: sewer separations, "floatables control" (screening out leaves and other crap that doesn't sink), outfall construction. Despite the fact that it was a legally mandated communication, I read it with some interest.

We live in Northwest Cambridge, a flat area left by sedimentation of a glacial lake: in earlier eras it was known as Great Swamp, though, compared to some "great swamps" in the Midwest, like the Great Black Swamp that once occupied northwest Ohio (1,500 square miles of it), it was pretty small potatoes. Cambridge has always promoted itself with great effectiveness.

Bush-league or not, the area is flat and low, and Alewife Brook, which drains it, only drops 16 feet from Fresh Pond to the Mystic River.  Not only does it flood easily as a result, it has always served as the main drain for all of the industries (slaughter houses, tanneries, brickyards, chemical plants) that occupied the drained swampland.

The industries are so long gone that a local developer considers "Tannery Brook" a classy name for some condos. It is all now residential. Classy development out from Harvard Square stopped when it reached the heights of the Fresh Pond moraine, with nicer developer-type names like Avon Hill and Strawberry Hill. I live where the employees of Avon Hill families lived.

Until recently, our sewers were not separate from our storm sewers, which meant that, when it rained, raw sewage would get dumped into Alewife Brook, and then run to the Mystic, and to Boston Harbor, doing its bit to help Dukakis lose in 1988. Slowly, bit by bit, that situation has been corrected, with slow and steady work to help water quality, prevent backups into basements, and minimize flooding.

Until I get one of these notices, this is all pretty invisible.  Sometimes a street is blocked, and people are digging a big hole. But who knows what's going on down there?

This is a gigantic investment, no question. And it needs constant maintenance, correction, and control. If some societal disruption occurs, there will first be small problems, backups and the like, and then bigger ones, as water quality declines and bacteria fill the streams.

So, while I was reading about "CSO Outfall CAM400" I was reflecting on how little my fiction can capture the unglamorous work that actually keeps civilization running. Not AI bounty hunters or negotiators with mysterious aliens, but hardhats with backhoes and bureaucrats with water-quality metrics.

Enough of unsung heroes, though.  Time to go out for a run.  See you later.

Word for the day (and maybe the month): greeble

A couple of weeks ago, I read an interesting piece on a sexed-up image of a drone that seems to have become the canonical image of that increasingly dominant device.

The Atlantic article extensively quotes the man who figured out that the image wasn't actually of a real, existing drone, James Bridle. In the quote, Bridle lists some of the evidence that the image is bogus:

The level of detail is too low: missing hatches on the cockpit and tail, the shape of the air intake, the greebling on the fins and body.

"Greebling"? Both Bridle and the article use the word as if it is something perfectly normal, not worth mentioning. I looked at those fins and body and saw no gremlin bites taken out of the leading edges, or anything else that might be greebling.

Greebling is all those plastic pieces of old Revell battleships that designers glued to spaceships to make them look more complicated, and thus, in some sense, more "realistic". Or, as Pooh-Bah might have described it, "merely corroborative detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative".

It's interesting that, in a world where all of our personal technology is designed to be utterly smooth, and everything from cars to coffee makers are as sleek as seals, that a whole bunch of crap makes something look like it's real.

Of course, a spaceship doesn't have to streamlined, and presumably you could put a lot of support gear on the outside of your living quarters. But that's not really the point. The point is that our mind likes to see several levels of detail. Gives us something to look at.

But I would argue that the word can also be used in analyzing prose fiction. We often add detail to make things seem real. Consider the following sequence of descriptive sentences:

He poured himself a drink.

He poured himself a glass of whiskey.

He poured the last of the Bulleit rye into the glass without washing it first.

That Bulleit rye (now that I wrote that, I am going to pull the bottle out of my desk drawer and, well pour it into a glass...ah, wonderful. Not quite the last of it, but close...has someone been getting at my private stock?) is greebling. Not only greebling, of course. It tells you something about me, my response to marketing, my socioeconomic status, or at least aspirations, and maybe that I have read way too many old detective novels.

But it is greebling, in the sense that most of us like sentences somewhere between Ernest Hemingway and Henry James. I didn't wander into James territory, because I could not imagine a James character taking a drink in less than a page, and we both have things to do, don't we? But some detail gives us enough to incorporate, without slowing us down too much. It's a delicate dance.  And, as anyone familiar with my work can tell you, I can greeble 'till the cows come home.

The term "greebling" needs to enter literary criticism. Consider this a start.

Back from Rome

Well, for a couple of weeks already, not all of it recovering from jet lag.

We had a great time.  We (me, wife, two teenagers) rented an apartment in Trastevere, on the other side of the Tiber from the center of Rome. It was relatively quiet and relaxed, with a couple of restaurants that became favorites (Ai Marmi, a pizza place with marble tables, was a regular hangout), and our apartment was a few minutes below San Pietro in Montorio, one of the spots where St. Peter was supposedly martyred, and the site of Bramante's elegant little Tempietto, which I would visit in the mornings.

In Classical times, Trastevere was the place where immigrants lived, and where foreigners and slaves convicted of murder were crucified, and their bodies left for the crows. That's why it kind of makes sense that St. Peter was crucified here, though it might have been up closer to the Vatican, where Caligula had built a racetrack.  Who knows?

A few favorite experiences:

Simon and I spent a day riding bicycles along the Appian Way, and then out to the Parco degli Acquedotti, a big park full of ruined aqueducts. There was almost no one around.

Our tour got into the Sistine Chapel early, so that for about half an hour there were only about a dozen people in the big space. It's weirder and more handmade looking than I had expected, but all the famous images are easy to see. The Conclave is meeting there right now.

After wandering around the various structures built into the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, we got to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a conversion of the baths' frigidarium by Michelangelo, later somewhat modified. The size of the place was astounding, and the marble and gold gave an impression of what the entire place must have looked like in its heyday. But the pattern of the whole neighborhood is based on the extensive structures, most now gone.

The Castel Sant'Angelo has a huge spiral passage inside, once used for the funeral processions of Hadrian's successors. The building has a lot of interesting apartments, some used for a large collection of art about St. Peter, including some striking Russian icons.  And the view from the top is great.

The old curia, the Senate house, rebuilt during the reign of Diocletian, is a surprisingly large interior space. Trained by Dad, the kids were able to identify a statue of that quirkiest of Emperors, Claudius. We also did the usual Palatine, Colosseum, Forum thing.  The ruins on the Palatine, ranging from Iron Age postholes to massive structures, are hard to figure out, but easy to be impressed by.

Caravaggios, the Via Julia, Santa Maria Maggiore (Big Mary's, as we called it)...a week barely scratches the surface. We didn't overtour or overeat, though the temptation to do both was everpresent. We were lucky in the weather, sunny most days, in the fifties F, with only a brief sprinkle of rain one day. No fights, only a pleasant time with a group of people I like very much, one that I will not always have so close to me.

You can see my architectural bias in what I listed. Parents have not only the right, but the duty to visit their obsessions on their children. What good is a parent without some intense focus? Doesn't matter if the kids never really share it. Someday it will pop up in the least-expected of contexts, and I will live again.

Off to Rome

It's been a busy and stressful couple of weeks, but now I get to take a week off.

Well, not off. I'm taking my wife and children to Rome next week. So it probably won't be relaxing, wrangling everyone, trying to explain the difference between Diocletian and Domitian, and Borromini and Bernini, convincing them that going to the ruins of Ostia is interesting, making walk too much. Our vacations together typically involve a cabin in the Adirondacks.

I've never been to Rome. Maybe it will shake something loose.  Life has been too much on top of me lately.  We can talk when I get back.

And a bit more on "Cities": get rid of the writers.

I got distracted, and didn't finish up my "different ways Jon Robin Baitz could have written Other Desert Cities so that it was not an unmitigated disaster." I'm sure you've been upset.

 A couple of weeks ago I examined the writers in the play, and how that particular déformation professionnelle might have played out, if Baitz had been interested in the characters he had set up.

But another way to go at it is to ditch the "writer" thing altogether, because, as I pointed out, writers and other professional observers are typically cheats in plays, because their motivation for looking at events is external to the conflict.

In the "non-writer" version, Brooke has long felt that her life is out of joint because of the events that led to her brother's death, events she has always though she understood, but now is beginning to see make no real sense as she remembers them. She digs into letters, talks to people who knew her parents, friends of her brother's, police reports. She begins to see that something is wrong. Perhaps she has suffered needlessly. Perhaps it is time for someone else to suffer.

So she comes home. She does not announce that she is blowing the lid off this conspiracy. Instead, she plays fragile dove, raising everyone's concerns, and asks innocent-seeming questions that lure people into contradictions in their memories. As a result Mom and Aunt Silda fight. Mom and Dad fight. Brooke has developed a theory. She knows what went down, and how everyone has been lying to her.

But Silda lied when Brooke interviewed her, because Silda wanted Brooke to adopt her view of things, a view determined by her hostility to her sister, a hostility growing out of still earlier events. Her younger brother, Trip, has a shard of memory, something completely out of place, of an event out by the pool, someone shouting something. He offers it tentatively. And everyone, Brooke included, rejects it. It fits no one's view of what happened. Possibly the audience can see the possible story, while none of the characters do.

I like this, because in the current version, all the characters are right on board with the "true" version of events. That's not going to happen, not with this crowd. Each will leave with his or her own vision of what went down. And that's cool, because we, the savvy audience, know what probably happened, who's alive and who's dead.

Maybe we do and maybe we don't. At the end, the child of the vet who died in brother Henry's bombing, shows up for vengeance, showing that this is not the only family's pain worth considering. But they're sure that only their pain is significant, so they circle the wagons, humiliate and dominate the poor stuttering youngster, deprived of everything.

Well, that denouement was actually a surprise to me. Has some resonance though.

Well enough. Maybe I'll get to to "Cities as a political play" at some point, but I figure everyone's pretty tired of it by this time.

It *is* Richard III

A couple of months ago, I wrote that they seemed to have found Richard III's body under a parking lot in Leicester.

Well, now it's official.  It's him. Odd to think that he was only 33 when he died.  Olivier played him at 48, McKellen at 55. Time to have him played by a younger actor--though who would have the heft?

This will give some impetus to the rerelease of Olivier's Technicolor drag-king fever dream Richard III, which I remember being fascinated by on late-night TV when I was in high school. "Hey, I actually like this," I remember thinking. "Maybe I am an intellectual after all."

But what would *you* do, if you're so smart? Further thoughts on "Cities"

A couple of days ago I went off on Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities, which I recently saw at the SpeakEasy theater in Boston. Despite some good dialogue, I found the play superficial and more than a little absurd. I spent a bit of time discussing how much I didn't like it.

But, usual, the failures of other writers, while pleasing, should also serve as an exercise for this particular writer. Smacking around a play most of my readers are unlikely to see seems to verge on the self-indulgent.

If I had been given the same idea as Baitz, what would I have done?  And what can I learn from the exercise of playing with it?

To refresh your memory, the play concerns a fragile writer, Brooke, who returns home to her Reaganesque power-couple parents' house in Palm Springs to reveal that she's written a book about the tragic suicide of her antiwar activist older brother, who was involved in a bombing that accidentally killed someone. In addition to her parents Polly and Lyman, the characters are Trip, a brother who is producer of a Judge-Judy-like reality show and Polly's alcoholic sister Silda, Polly's former screenwriting partner.

Two divergent paths come to me immediately. The first is to play with the writer as writer, and dig more deeply into Brooke's writerly self. The second is to dump the writer persona as irrelevant, because, while having your secrets revealed in The New Yorker may be more painful than just having your neighbors know, that's a kind of measurement that's not relevant to a play about intra-family relations.

Though I have to point out, there are no secrets revealed in Brooke's book, as described. All of this painful stuff came out in the news, was talked about, chewed over, had its effects on Polly and Lyman's relations with their buddies the Reagans, everything. Her blame of her parents for those events can't be particularly new either.

There may be other ways to take this too, but I'll go for "writer" first.  Brooke is a writer, a depressive who had a breakdown after the success of her first novel, which everyone in the play insists is brilliant, even at moments when they are angry enough to strangle her. Polly and Silda are both writers, who collaborated on a series of popular movies, until Silda quit. Trip seems to be a writer too. Actually the only non-writer is Lyman, a popular actor in Westerns and other popular films.

All of these writers are competitive, perceptive, and self-dramatizing. Or, at least, they should be. Brooke is blocked and will do anything become unblocked, including exploiting a private and painful tragedy. But instead of admitting this, she claims it is going to help everyone by clearing the air. Just because a writer is perceptive about others doesn't mean she is perceptive about herself.

But that's kind of where it ends. But she's facing, not a passive bunch of middle-aged theatergoers, but her writing mother, aunt, and brother. And, it turns out, her Aunt Silda served as Deep Throat for events that Brooke could not otherwise know anything about. In a sense, Brooke is Silda's cats paw here.

But to what end? First of all, everything in what we hear of Brooke's book was events she personally witnessed. It seems that Silda's intervention is purely stylistic.

Of course not! First off, she does play Brooke. Against Polly--because Polly did something that caused the breakup of their writing team, many years before. It might well have been Polly's drift to self-righteous Reaganism, which makes Silda want to puke.

As Brooke reveals what is in the book, Trip notes that she never talked to him, and he witnessed at least one scene that seems divergent from her story.  But he was young. Does Polly then point out that the scene he says he is remembering is actually from one of those movies that she and Silda scripted? Memory is a tricky thing.

In Baitz's play, it is revealed that, aside from having bad faith, Brooke can't do elementary research, and completely misses the real story. But the "real story" is that her parents are even more vicious than she thinks they are: they let her spiral into suicidal depression as a consequence of a false version of reality. They are much worse than Brooke thought. Baitz seems to miss this inevitable conclusion of his scenario.

Instead, Brooke is a better writer than she is portrayed. She can see where there are gaps in the story, even if she can't figure out what is hidden in them. She reveals her conclusions. They are wrong, but so is the surface story. It is the cause of her brother's suicide that she can't understand.

In Hamlet and his Problems, T. S. Eliot said "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." So, too, Brooke's older brother. But we're not Shakespeare, so we are going to dig out the invisible facts, to express his unexpressed emotion for him.

Polly and Silda have to fight over their writing breakup, which had to do with the effects their divergent politics had on their work. Trip has to work out why he remembers something the others claim is fiction, and Brooke has to face that she is a writer who will destroy her family rather than be blocked.

And Lyman? Lyman has stopped playing roles. Actors always seem smarter than they actually are, because they have access to all those great words. He has given up on great words. He loved his dead son, he loves his living son and daughter, and his wife, and he's willing to give Silda a pass because she used to write stuff that made him laugh. The actor will serve as the one still point in this scrum of wordsmiths.

Enough. Next time let's check out what happens if Brooke is not a writer.

The perils of "politics": Baitz's "Other Desert Cities"

When you see a play about "politics" in a Boston or Cambridge theater, you're pretty sure what you're going to get: an image of Republicans (or, more generally, well-off white people, who can, to be fair, also be clueless liberals) as oppressive hypocrites. On that score, Jon Robin Baitz, in his play "Other Desert Cities", currently at the Music Box in Boston, does not disappoint.

The story of the play is pretty simple.  Lyman and Polly Wyeth are Hollywood Reagan Republicans, with extensive film credits, he for acting, she for writing, and now live in busy retirement in Palm Springs. Their unstable daughter Brooke comes to visit, to tell them that she has written a book about them and her older brother, Henry, who got involved in radical antiwar activities and committed suicide.

A play involving a writer already has a problem. Instead of having a need to examine the past that grows out the unwelcome compulsion of someone who has other things to do, Brooke is a professional witness and rememberer, and so digs things up because it is consistent with her job.  Brooke had a breakdown, and an early book that everyone insists was brilliant. She hasn't been able to write for a long time. Grabbing her family's tragedy is an easy out for her. A blocked writer will do anything to get words on the page.

But that's subtext, and if it's anything Baitz hates, it's subtext. Every underlying stress is laid out by the characters in articulate, verbose speeches. Everyone talks about what they are talking about. No one says one thing while meaning another, no one is after anything that is not right in front of them, no one slyly changes the subject while seeming to be candid.

Two other characters are Trip, the youngest brother, who produces a cheesy reality TV show and seems like he should be funnier than he is, and Polly's truth-telling alcoholic sister Silda, who gets some unearned laughs by condemning Republicans for being Republicans. Truth-telling alcoholics are almost as dangerous to plays as writers.

Polly and Silda used to write movies together, then had a falling out, a story that seems much more interesting than this one.

The first act was actually not bad, with some snappy patter. When he relaxes, Baitz can write. The second is endless, and involves the revelation of a secret so freaking stupid that you can't believe it.  The secret is so big and lumpish that in order to have missed it, Brooke's search for truth turns out to be so lame and pathetic it's lucky she can remember where her parents live.

What might have saved this absurd revelation is for each of the characters to reveal something else that makes the previous version false, but Baitz hates ambiguity as much as he hates subtext, so there is a true story, damn it, and he's going to tell it to you, no matter how dumb it is.

If you search for reviews of this play online, you will see a lot of raves. That makes no sense to me at all. Even if you liked the play (and my friend Marilyn did, and was a bit hurt that Sherri and I thought it was total dreck), I don't think you can make much of a claim for quality. But I've had this trouble before with earnest productions aimed at our waning demographic. We went to the SpeakEasy to avoid these things, but it seems they have followed us from the Huntington.

In the Playbill, it twice mentions that Baitz was fired from the show he created, Brothers and Sisters, because, he says, he wanted to do "...an entertaining meditation on class and position in America" and the producers wanted a night-time soap opera.

Maybe.

No one boos at plays anymore, and I didn't either. I just put my coat on and left in silence.  Like many other talented modern playwrights, Baitz needed to be challenged, edited, forced to rewrite and rewrite again. Instead he was overpraised, and the result is Other Desert Cities.

The rising marginal cost of alcoholic originality

I owe the term "rising marginal cost of originality" to the economist and fantasy writer David Friedman, at his Ideas blog.  In the post I've linked to, he explains why, in intensively researched fields "anything new is quite likely to be either uninteresting or wrong". He says he usually cites city planning or architecture as examples.

But it's everywhere. I can't imagine being an academic right now, particularly in the humanities. The only things you can say about Jane Austen, or Saxon rood screens, or a Mozart quartet have either been said before, or shouldn't be said. But you need to research, you need to publish, you need to get tenure. Sometimes, I presume, something actually interesting and fruitful comes to light. But the odds are against it.

You see this a lot in cocktails. Most good cocktails are three ingredients: base liquor, secondary flavor (juice, vermouth, whatever), and something like bitters. But the number of three-element combinations is limited, and most, over the past century or two of sophisticated drink pounding, have either become established, or rejected as unpleasant.

So what is an adventurous bartender to do? Either create or uncover some new flavor (the unfortunate prevalence of drinks made with elderflower is a result of such), or create drinks of flabbergasting complexity, with at least half a dozen ingredients, many of them infusions of yet other flavors.

Sometimes they uncover a new  peak in the fitness landscape of alcoholic flavors. More often, they find themselves in some mediocre area, neither high nor low. A Negroni is a local maximum. Gin, Campari, sweet vermouth. Move too far away from that, and you've reduced the drink's value. Ditto a Manhattan (whiskey (often rye), sweet vermouth, bitters).

OK, so I sometimes like both of these perfect (half and half sweet and dry vermouth--so sue me). But monkeying with them any more benefits no one save the person hired to write the drink description in the menu. What is important for a good drink is clarity and precision, as well a good glassware, fresh peels and house-macerated cherries, and a snappy line of patter. Not more ingredients.

In his post, Friedman suggests exploring extensively--using your skills in some area that people have overlooked. In economics, his subject, it's clearly the coming thing, as the success of Freakonomics shows.

In bartending, I'm not so sure.

If you must know, this post was composed while drinking, not a cocktail, but Hoponius Union, an IPA-hopped lager from Jack's Abby, from nearby Framingham. A great beer, if you haven't tried it. There is still a lot of room of intensive exploration in the art of getting sozzled.

Thank goodness.

Lincoln: Spielbergo's redemption

I've long regarded Steven Spielberg as the Leni Riefenstahl of democratic capitalism: a brilliant film maker who, handicapped by an ideological predisposition, prefers manipulation to revelation.

This thought came to me most vividly in a scene in the mediocre Saving Private Ryan (a brilliant landing montage succeeded by an overproduced WWII B picture that takes itself so seriously it drowns before reaching the beach). A message is on the way to the Ryan mother to tell her her sons are dead. The camera pans across the inside of the mother's rural farmhouse, as gauzily lit as a 70s Penthouse spread, silver-framed photographs on the bureau, wide fields outside...then a gleaming sedan pulls drives across the field, as if Christina from Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World had finally gotten herself some wheels. It's more Saving Private Lauren ("But Ralph...is Ralph still alive? He was the only one of the boys who truly appreciated my style").

In that movie Spielberg was so unsure of himself that a letter Lincoln wrote to a mother who lost her sons during the Civil War gets read not once, but twice (though read the Wikipedia entry: the internet gives us our illusions, and then, if we pay attention, takes them away).

Dammit, Spielbergo, I want people to cry when I die

So Spielberg finally did the sensible thing and turned to Lincoln himself. My daughter Faith and I saw the movie on Monday. Aside from a few Spielbergian bits of overreach (I didn't need that first scene, with its recitals of the Gettysburg Address), it is amazing. Everyone's at the top of their game, no one more than Daniel Day-Lewis (who was always my choice to play Maturin in any Patrick O'Brian-based movie) as Lincoln. He gets the reedy, rural tone just right. Future actors, playing Lincoln, will find themselves playing Day-Lewis.

The movie shows the arm-twisting, party discipline, deal-making, and genuine principle that are all part of any great legislative enactment, even the 13th Amendment. It's not all noble speechmaking. It's funnest visit to the legislative sausage factory you're ever likely to have.

Vampires may be a metaphor for slavery, but slavery needs no metaphor to be a horror. Can one be a genuine American and not revere Lincoln? I try to be generous, but most of the time, I believe that to be impossible. Those who disdain Lincoln have something damaged deep in their souls. Lincoln would have deeply believed that they could be healed, and brought home. I am no Lincoln, and doubt it very much.

See it. I have forgiven Spielberg everything. Well, he could have muted John Williams and stopped zooming slowly in on people while they talked in case we missed the significance of what they were saying ("listen, you idiot, this is important"), but these characteristic flaws are a small price to pay for the existence of this movie.

Ancient geology and modern election results

Today I was delighted to read an account of the Driftless Area, and its effects on election results (HT: Kids Prefer Cheese).

The Driftless Area is a region, mostly in Wisconsin, but also covering parts of Minnesota and Iowa, that escaped glaciation during the last ice age (and thus lacks deposits of glacial drift, hence the name--it still snows a lot there). As a result, its topography is both hillier and more deeply dissected by river valleys than surrounding areas.

It also went for Obama significantly more than neighboring, equally rural areas did. While rural areas across the country (with another exception I'll mention below) went for Romney, these counties went blue. The demographics of the region don't seem to vary much from neighboring areas. What gives?

Maybe some ancient evil that was not extirpated by the busy glaciers...August Derleth could have explained it. And I looked--Sauk City, where he grew up, is right on the edge of the Driftless Area. Coincidence? I don't think so!

I was delighted, because I remember reading the only literary reference to the Driftless Area that I can remember: in #11 of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. books, The Invisibility Affair, by "Thomas Stratton" (a nom d'oncle of Buck Coulson and Gene DeWeese). The book involves an invisible dirigible, the Horicon marsh, and a car trunk full of margarine, among other things. I have cited the book's analysis of laws against selling colored margarine in dairy-producing areas as an example of regulations that claim to protect the public but actually protect some specific interest group, and no, I have never checked whether what it said was true, why do you ask? Ilya Kuryakin would never lie to me. The action takes place in that region of Wisconsin. Unfortunately I got rid of those books years ago, so I can't check whether it is still any good.  I loved those books as a kid.  And look how edumacated they made me!

Oh, the other geological influence on election results? The location of a Cretaceous sea determined where chalk would be deposited, and thus where a band of rich and well-drained soils would appear across the American South and be particularly suitable for large-scale cotton plantations worked by slaves, and thus where, to this day, large numbers of African Americans live, and vote Democrat, turning those counties blue.

Cretaceous seas and missing glaciers: anyone know of any other geological correlations to political alignments?

My route to inbox zero

Inbox zero, the state of having your email inbox, your paper mail inbox, and your brain inbox ("Oh, I really should remember that I need to....") empty, with everything that's come in decided on or processed, is a goal many of us have, following the Getting Things Done mantra.

I sure do. I usually fail.  But sometimes I succeed. How I fail, and how I succeed, are worth thinking about, because, looking at what goes wrong, I have discovered two basic rules that make success more likely (this applies mostly to the email box, which is the fastest to fill and the hardest to empty):

1. Don't leave your inbox visible. Check it at some wide intervals during the day--every couple of hours is probably a reasonable interval. And don't look at it first thing in the morning. Work steadily for at least a couple of hours at some important project before you open it up.
2. When you finally do open it up, give yourself a decent block of time and process the emails in received order, one at a time, without skipping any.

Yeah, I know. That's a bit like saying that the rules for picking up a gigantic boulder are:

1. Work out and develop gigantic, awesome muscles.
2. Pick that sucker up!

But it's not, really.  Though you could probably stand to do more lifting than you do, right?

I've found that if I watch emails come in, I am driven to respond to them right away. Then I ignore other, more fraught, difficult, or time-consuming emails. They pile up, and then, like abandoned houses, attract a lot of riffraff in various other neglected emails. In a day or so, I have a mess again.

The same is true of my paper inbox.  If I deal with bills and statements every day or so, I have no problem. If the emotional pain of one specific one causes me to delay it, it too serves as a dark area where other stuff accumulates.

Ideas are really the same way.  Sometimes there is not good reason why I'm avoiding some thought, but I can see that I am.  Right now I have to make plane reservations to go to something not particularly onerous, but that somehow has become something I am avoiding.  All sorts of other stuff has gotten backed up because of that, and I risk encountering high ticket prices when I actually go to do it.

So, you see, I haven't solved the problem.  But I do know what practices make the problem worse, and which decrease it. Then it's up to me.

What if Nate Silver had accurately predicted a Romney victory?

Many commentators on the blogs I usually read (centrist, maybe skewing left, self-defining as "smart" rather than overtly "partisan") are immensely pleased with the Nate Silver's accomplishment in calling the election results based on his number-crunching of the polls, rather than the "expert sense" of various right-tending commentators: this Language Log post contains probably the clearest summary of both the history, the pleased feeling, and a cute meme about Silver.

Look, I checked out Five Thirty Eight, Silver's NYT blog pretty much every day in the runup to the election. But that was that I pretty much liked what he was saying. It predicted a result I tended to favor.

Silver clearly has something, and it makes sense that we respect him for analyzing things correctly. It's just that we who liked the prediction he was making shouldn't congratulate ourselves too much for having the sense to see what a great analyst he was. If he'd been accurately predicting the same Romney victory that people like the normally sensible George Will were, how much honor would he have gotten from the left side of the commentariat? Would they have just accepted his results, or would they have devoted a huge amount of effort to poke holes in them?

Right now we'd see him front and center on Drudge, and he'd be getting interview requests from Fox News. The right would be congratulating itself on how devoted to honest statistics they were.

I like to think that the rationality-trending part of the left would still have respected him for his analysis, and that people wouldn't have made delusional predictions of an significant Obama victory in the same way that Barone, Will, Noonan, and others did.

But you don't cheer your team by yelling "The statistics show that our opponents will probably win!"

Is Stephen Carter's The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Science Fiction?

What makes Stephen L. Carter’s The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln mainstream historical fiction rather than science-fictional alternate history? Maybe nothing—the book deserves a Nebula nomination, given that other alternate histories have been nominated. Maybe it’s just the marketing that put the book on another shelf.

Carter writes better than most science fiction writers, but that should not disqualify him.

Carter also eschews a lot of hand-to hand combat, complex break-ins into secret chambers under the unfinished Washington Monument, dead-eyed Western riflemen, Chinese mandarins with elaborate diction, Himalayan religious devotions, Texans ensuring the independence of their republic, submarines, silk balloons made out of ladies’ underwear, steam-powered pogo sticks, locomotive-repairing gamines with adorable smudges of grease on their high cheekbones, and Mark Twain.

OK, so he’s just faking it. The man clearly doesn’t know a thing about alternate history.

He does know how to write a good story, though, and I had a great time with it. His point of view character is Abigail Canner, a young black woman from a high-status black family in Washington who wants to become a lawyer, and gets swept up in the shenanigans surrounding the impeachment of an Abraham Lincoln who survived the assassination attempt at Ford’s Theater (“He had been shot on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, he rose.”)

There is much fun stuff about social life on either side of the color line (with “the many evil Mellison daughters” who taunt poor Abigail as particular standouts), legal researching, courting, politics, and corruption. A number of historical characters put in appearances, including James G. Blaine, our old “continental liar from the state of Maine” and William Tecumseh Sherman.

I can guess one thing about Stephen Carter, without ever having met him: he is not a scoundrel. Nor is he a scalawag, or a rogue. I doubt he is even a rascal.

And that’s too bad. Because to handle a man like Daniel Sickles, a major figure in the narrative, you had best have features of all of those, as well as those of a con man, a circus ringmaster, a military commander, a ward heeler, and a Don Juan. Sickles has claims on being more interesting even than my old favorite, Benjamin Butler, who also appears in the narrative, but only at a distance during the trial itself. Here Sickles is one of those characters writers can’t resist as describing as “colorful”, without really showing any signs of why anyone would think that. Instead of propositioning Abigail and then claiming she stole his wallet, he performs able service to the cause. Not that Sickles wasn’t able. He was just a lot of other things as well.

One of Sickles's achievements: killing his wife's lover (the son of Francis Scott Key) and getting away with it by a plea of temporary insanity--Edwin Stanton, future Secretary of War, was his lawyer

As was my old favorite, Benjamin Butler, who appears here only on the other side of the Senate floor, as a major prosecutor in the impeachment proceedings, as he was in the historical impeachment of Andrew Johnson that serves as its model. I wish Carter had brought him up close and personal, and not described him as tall and blond without noting that he was pudgy, squint-eyed, and balding.

Did I hear someone say "no Adonis"?

Actually, the ghost of Gore Vidal (a particular favorite of mine, though he became a major crank in his later years) hovers over this work. Carter ably handles the social maneuvers at parties, the closed-door negotiations, the gossip, and the naked lust for power that were all Vidalian fascinations. He even features Kate Sprague, Salmon P. Chase’s elegant daughter, who was a major character in Vidal’s superb, if much-debated, Lincoln.

And Lincoln was a major character in Vidal’s Lincoln. Carter treats him surprisingly gingerly, sticking mostly the comical stories Lincoln used to deflect opponents and conceal his goals. Carter admits to being worried about portraying this astonishing and perplexing man. But Lincoln is the focus of the story, not a major character.

But Carter does encumber his narrative with an overly complex alternate conspiracy in addition to the Congressional cabal that is seeking to impeach the President. As always, the requirements of the conspiracy plot eventually compete for vital character oxygen with the actual surface plot, Abigail’s relationship with her complicated family, the young lawyer who has an interest in her, and all the other characters who seek to help her, confuse her, or use her. Some key figures get shortchanged.

I think Carter should have trusted his characters and the clever situation he had created for them more. The maneuvers around the impeachment were quite enough to hold my interest. But even with that handicap, it was one of the most fun books I’ve read in quite a while. Highly recommended.

Fruit Looper

I took Simon, my 16-year-old son, to see Looper a bit ago.  He loved it.

Me, not so much.

Of course, you know that I don't generally care for science fiction movies, which I usually find dumb. I found this retread of The Terminator to be dumber than most.

One problem is one I've  had before: movies can make horrible protagonists seem appealing by casting attractive actors and making them the focus.  In this case, we have Joe who, despite living in a vast and busy world, can only get a job shooting helpless tied-up men in cornfields at the behest of mysterious future criminals. He has no interests aside from taking drugs and patronizing prostitutes. When his future self comes back, he does so to murder small children. Yep, one great guy.

But the movie is full of silly things (no real spoilers here, I hope):

• The victims from the future come back with payment in the form of big silver bars. Joe, seeking to get a stake so he can free himself, keeps the silver bars in a big vault under his floor, which everyone seems to know about. They must weigh half a ton. Why doesn't he convert them to cash, the way everyone else seems to?
• There is a big city, and corn fields with empty roads. No suburbs, no shopping malls, nothing. You can even see the city from the corn field.
• When Joe is being pursued, he runs straight home, presumably to shove the silver bars in his pockets.
• Future criminals have a time machine. In fact, they have sent one of their own back in time (Jeff Daniels, in a relaxed and witty performance). But otherwise they just dump bodies through it (the machine looks like a bathysphere from the 1930s), rather than going back to this past time to make fortunes.
• In 2044, people still hop on open freight cars to get free travel.
• Time paradoxes are incredibly fluid here. There is one creepy horror-movie scene of a future person being whittled down by actions against his younger self (shades of doing things to a person in order to destroy a voodoo doll in Theodore Sturgeon's story "A Way of Thinking"), but it wouldn't suffer much examination.

SF is too often an excuse for laxness, and this movie took full advantage.  Watch The Terminator instead, which got this kind of thing right.

Why is it always biceps curls?

I'm sure everyone has already seen the pictures of Paul Ryan at the weight bench.

But this isn't really about Paul Ryan. It's about biceps curls, probably the most useless weight exercise going for a regular person who wants to build muscle and stay in shape. I call them "the Doritos of fitness".

For some reason, someone curling a dumbbell has become shorthand for "weightlifting", and thus for "fitness". I guess it's partly the different angles you can photograph someone from.  Squats can be kind of gross from the wrong angle, and someone doing bench presses is lying down. Plus, since those are real exercises, the subject's face gets all red and distended.  And you can't keep doing them for long.

Still, it's time to get things like biceps curls and dumbbell side lifts out of the picture. They work tiny little muscles and really don't do much, which is why people like doing them: they don't make you hurt while you're doing them and they don't leave you exhausted afterward. Work movements, not muscles, and work as much of your body as you can. Do some pull-ups while you're at it.  I think those would make a good replacement for the hackneyed biceps curl.

I'm sure Paul Ryan doesn't spend much time on biceps curls in his routine. I mean, that would be doing something with no real effect just for show, kind of like talking about cutting foreign aid or the public television budget as a way to try to balance the budget....

Iron Sky

Last night I went to a showing of the Finnish Nazis-on-the-Moon SF extravaganza Iron Sky with some friends from my writing workshop:  Steve Popkes, Sarah Smith, and Heather Albano, along with Heather's husband Richard and couple of work friends of Steve's.

It was fairly entertaining, if you are generous, which I, out with my friends after a few beers, was inclined to be.  I grew up on Hogan's Heroes, so simultaneously obsessed and comical Nazis are part of my background. Nice special effects, a sexy serious Nazi in a tight skirt, a black astronaut turned white and blond through an albinism serum intended to heal his ethnic defect, and a Sarah Palinesque US President keep things interesting.

Don't look for narrative logic, however. Lots of irrelevance about the #2 Nazi wanting to take over from the #1 Nazi, and a wag-the-dog-like use of the Nazis by a President running for reelection (in 2014--since that's not particularly funny, I can only assume that's a genuine mistake made by people with a vocabulary with too many double vowels).

And its satire doesn't go very deep.  Once the black astronaut is turned Caucasian, aside from a predictable encounter with a black gang, it doesn't really go anywhere.  Europeans think pointing out that the US has complex racial relations is enough to qualify as satire. Saying "Hey, it's President Sarah Palin!" only gets you so far too. The actors are just OK, and use the camp positioning as an excuse for not working too hard.  This is particularly true of the Christopher Kirby, who plays the black astronaut.  Udo Kier does do a nice job as the world-weary Fuhrer Kortzfleisch.

So, it kind of wanted to be Dr. Strangelove in space, but fell far short of that.  Just laziness and coddling by the fan base, I suspect. SF fans like predictable jokes that reinforce their prejudices.  After 200+ years, Europeans are still appalled by and frightened of the United States, but they think the target is so big that they don't have to aim very accurately. Not true, you Euroweenies!  This whole thing could have been a lot better with a less self-indulgent approach to being funny.

So, lower your expectations, and you can have an OK time.  Watch for an entertaining speech from the North Korean representative to the UN.  A lot of beer helps.