A few weeks ago I wrote about my role as the crazy uncle of writing workshops.
Now you can confirm or deny this clame for yourself. Jeanne Cavelos just sent me a link to two segments of my clueless rant about perceptive analysis of plot. Now you can check out what my students are exposed to.
I am podcast #76 here. If you get a chance, let me know what you think.
I'm fiddling with a story that has an annotator. You know,one of those secondary unreliable narrators who add notes to what purports to be the main narrative, arguing with it, subverting it, sometimes amplifying it. Just to make it more complicated, the main story is itself a lexicon, a collection of entries on an alien culture.
In my original thoughts, both the lexicographer and the annotator were male, two standard types of literary academics, one more flamboyant and fraudulent, one more nervous and obsessive. But I always like to try out different alternatives, and one would be to change the sex of one or both of these characters.
But, somehow, the obsessive annotator seems to naturally come down as male. At the moment, I can't figure out if that is just literary convention, or actually says something about the male neurophysiology. I'm inclining to the "it's just convention" position, since there are certainly many autism-spectrum women, obsessively detail-oriented women, narcissistic "this is about me, isn't it" women, etc. But, in my experience, while they certainly act as unreliable narrators, they more rarely appear as annotators. Maybe Amy Dunne, the wife in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, can count as an annotator, though not in a strict technical sense.
Could Kinbote be female? This is the kind of thing I think about when I can't sleep, which was certainly true last night.
I grew in in Illinois, in suburban Chicago. I have relatives in Minnesota, Ohio, and Michigan. I am a Midwesterner, and will never be anything else. Acute ears here in Boston can instantly peg me to, not only the greater Midwest, but the Great Lakes area.
So I am surprised that there is debate about which states are actually in the Midwest. In this survey from 538, only 80% of respondents thought Illinois was in the Midwest. Who are these people, and why do they bother having opinions about anything?
To me, the Midwestern states are (West to East): Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, MIchigan, and Ohio. No Southern states, please. No Missouri, no Kentucky (!), One historical characteristic of Midwest states: they were settled from New England, and they were not slave states. In a sense, you could say that southern Illinois and Indiana are not in the Midwest, by this criterion, being more Southern inflected. It's basically the old Northwest Territory, plus Iowa ("around here, dear, we pronounce that Ohio").
The Old Northwest Territory
So they have townships, deep glacial soil and a lot of other glacial geography, nice folks who like casseroles (or "hot dishes"), and a scattering of French place names, which they grotesquely mispronounce.
Quick rule: if you could imagine anyone in town volunteering to serve in the Confederate Army, it is not the Midwest. It is somewhere much meaner and more ornery. Maybe more fun, I won't argue about that. But not the Midwest.
And no Great Plains states. Great states, all, but completely different. Less water: not a lot of canoeing. I'd say Midwest is corn and hogs instead of wheat and cattle, but Minnesota and Wisconsin wouldn't fit then. People from Minnesota are incredibly nice, so they want their friends in North and South Dakota to be in the Midwest. I've lived in Massachusetts long enough to say: screw that. Get your own region.
And, seriously, Wyoming, or Pennsylvania? Once words can mean anything, how do you communicate?
Perhaps with a gesture, I guess, which is not visible in this post.
My story "Feral Moon" came out in Asimov's last year. It's a work of military SF, somewhat out of my usual line, and I was pleased with it. It had been a long time since I'd written a solid novella. It dealt with the specific tactical issues of fighting your way through an inhabited asteroid (moon, really, this taking place inside Phobos) as well as the strategic issues of a too-long series of wars and the emotional issues of a recently dissolved marriage.
StarShipSofa has done an audio version of it. Check it out.
As I've mentioned before, when you write things, you can never be sure what will catch someone else's imagination. While I think I have coined many sly and clever aphorisms in my time, the one that has had real legs is
This is my "rose red city, half as old as time"
This nice graphic comes from this article, which informs me that Billy Beane, the baseball GM who was the subject of Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, is particularly fond of the quote. The article is nice in that it cites me very specifically.
I can't say as I've seen a lot of sales and interest coming to me as a result of this, but then, how would I really know?
I am currently working on a story that involves archeological hoaxes and the Mound Builder myth. One research book is Mound Builders of Ancient America, by SF's own Robert Silverberg. He has written several pleasing historical works during his career, and this one is complete, well-researched, and well-written.
One thing that strikes me is the cover illustration. which is identified as "An American Battle Mound" from a book called Traditions of De-coo-dah, by William Pidgeon (1858), an imaginative reconstruction of some ancient battle.
Would probably work better with parapetsThe thing that strikes me about the picture, though, is the two guys in front. While there is a desperate battle going on, they've decided to have a friendly little chat.
So, what are you doing this weekend, anything?I guess the artist needed a still point in the foreground to point up the frenzied activity in back. Or maybe the whole thing was less of a deal than it might seem.
Mound Builder myth has some relation to the Book of Mormon, and there is an illustration in the standard edition of that book which struck me in high school, and which I just looked up. It involves one of those many prophets throughout both myth and history who piss people off. Real prophets always do, you know, so be careful of anyone who claims to be a prophet, either in life or in fiction, who does not stimulate rage and opposition in otherwise placid people.
Safety firstThe Nephite inhabitants of this town are trying to get Samuel the Lamanite to just shut up.
But you know what's interesting? Not only did the Nephites build a nice staircase up to their parapet, they made sure it had an OSHA-approved guard rail.
Enough poking fun. I have to get back to work.
I'm going to start out with my clever definition of what the word "apologetics" means, and then I'm going to relate to a somewhat ill-mannered thing I sometimes do while giving a critique in a writing workshop. Ready?
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Gross and Livingstone (why should an atheist have this massive tome sitting in the bookshelf closest his work desk? The world is full of mysteries. Even if you are an atheist) defines apologetics as "The defence of Christian belief and of the Christian way against alternatives and against criticism". But the part of it I find most interesting is when a religion has to explain some really weird thing in its scriptures or its traditions that outsiders make fun of. You come up with a mechanism. You explain how this seemingly out-of-context thing really is essential to the context. You create a story out bits of other stories. This can be an extremely creative act.
So I do define apologetics as explaining why what seems to be a bug is actually a feature. I was inspired to this way of approaching it from an episode of Roman Mars's wonderful podcast 99% Invisible, the one on interface design in SF movies called Future Screens Are Mostly Blue. Go listen to it, it's both funny and informative. What we all strive for.
What does this have to do with workshop critiquing? My, you are full of questions today, aren't you? Lost your negative capability again?
Sometimes there are things a writer has written that don't seem to hang together. Characters seem incorrectly motivated, events seem to arrive without cause. Maybe the author has a deeper scheme. Or maybe the author, being human, just hasn't worked things out thoroughly.
So coming up with an explanation for these disparate events, even if that explanation is clearly not what the poor author ever intended, can be....well, okay, it really isn't that useful to the person being critiqued. It's like doing backflips over a car wreck. This form of literary apologetics, particularly used in a mean-spirited way, is just not good form.
I like to think that wanting to show me where I'm wrong is a motivating force. Or is that just after-the-fact self-justification?
At any rate, use this on some piece of your own that has pieces you like, but just isn't jelling. What other underlying scheme might explain the observed phenomena? How many different coherent explanations can you come up with? Do any of them have features that stimulate your own thoughts?
Or do what Noessel and Shedroff, the subjects of the episode, do, and come up with other explanations for what doesn't make sense to you about works you love but find annoying in some way. It can be a really fruitful way of interacting with them, and is the basis for some lively fanfic.
In the past I have praised dentists for their largely unsung role in making our lives better.
Today I will do it again. A few months ago I lost a chunk of a tooth, and finally went in to get a crown fitted. I learned two interesting things.
One is that many crowns are now made of zirconia, a different form than that used for earrings sold on QVC, but based on the same properties of hardness. In a few weeks I will have zirconia in my mouth. I'll let you know how that works. Every time you go to the dentist, there is some new device, implant, material, or procedure. It never stops. That is the great thing about our civilization. No matter what it is, someone is working constantly to make it better, cheaper, or faster. A time traveler with a tooth problem would startle a dentist from even a decade ago.
The other interesting thing was that the dentist carefully matches tooth color. Everyone's teeth have slightly different shades. My dentist brought out a whole board of tooth color samples and carefully matched them against my teeth, finally picking one color for the bottom (darker) and another for the top (lighter). When I said that when he decided on his career he probably had never expected color matching to have to be part of his skillset, he said seriously that aesthetics is really important, and that a crown or implant that does not match the surrounding teeth is considered a failure. I don't know if the Pantone corporation, which essentially owns all color, also has a stake in tooth colors, but I wouldn't be surprised.
He explained each procedure as he performed it, drilled and excavated away, put on a temporary crown, and sent me on my way.
For much of human history the occasional person who managed to survive to my advanced age had no teeth. I not only have teeth, they are firm in my mouth, and those with problems are replaced with indistinguishable replicas. Give thanks to dentists, and the researchers and device makers who keep our dental technology moving forward. Sexy? No. Wonderful? Yes.
In my new stint of writing, I have so far been successful in having one story thought about and ready to be started as I come to final words of the last. Some days I have even finished one story and started the next in the same session.
This is a great way to keep the work flowing. But it does require that you have a story ready and thought about when the last one reaches THE END.
But tomorrow morning, when I get to my desk at 5:30, I won't! I finished a story this morning, and thought I would put another one together tonight, only to spend my time on a lot of essential business. It's nice to say that writing should always take priority, but there is a lot of other things that need to get done.
So I'm going to have to do what I don't like, and that is just start writing, hoping a story will emerge. Some writers thrive on this. I do not. Sometimes I do create something useful. More often, though, I create...a lot of words.
Wish me luck, and if you are up early, like I am, throw some narrative thoughts my way.
One thing we see in religiously fundamentalist cultures is an opposition to female schooling. This comes up in the news most often about Moslem fundamentalists, but is part of other fundamentalist traditions as well. The usual explanation for this is the kind of non-explanation about how these people just want to keep women down, women are threatening to their worldview, something like that. Those things might very well be true, but seem inadequate.
A couple of days ago I was listening to Russ Roberts's indispensable Econtalk podcast. It was an interview with Edward Lazear on the works of the economist Gary Becker, who died recently. One topic caught my ear: Becker's work on the opportunity cost of raising a child, where he, controversially, classified a child as "a consumer durable".
Becker was trying to explain why poorer women in the 19th century had fewer children than wealthy women, while, in the 20th and 21st centuries, it was wealthy women who had fewer children. If having a child is a choice (and to some extent it always has been, even before reliable contraception), the relevant resource is the woman's time, since women, even in our theoretically equalitarian age, do the majority of child-rearing.
So Gary reasoned, well, if it's the mother's time that's involved then you have to ask: What is the cost of using the mother's time? And of course in economics one of the most fundamental concepts is opportunity cost. It's the cost of foregoing the next best alternative. And so Gary then reasoned that the opportunity cost of a child was the price of the mother's time; and the price of the mother's time is what she could be doing elsewhere. And that related to her wage rate. All right, so what does that tell you? Well, in the 20th century, what that says is that when women had the option to work, or when most women were working, as they are now, what you'd expect is that women with high wages have very high values of time, and as a result, it's more costly for them to take time off and to have children, and so they tend to have fewer of them.
In the 19th century, it was poorer women whose time value was higher, given how valuable their labor on the farm or in the household was to the success of the family enterprise, so they tended to have fewer children than wealthy women, who, given the constraints they faced, could contribute little to their own families.
That's an interesting observation and explanation of facts otherwise hard to explain, the kind of thing Becker was known for.
My issue here is not that, but to note that if you have a cultural value of having lots of children, and see them as an underlying resource in your struggle against the world, and essential to the success of your enterprise, the last thing you want is educated women, no matter how much value you get out of their additional brainpower. The greater the value of that brainpower, in fact, the less likely they will be to want to give birth to and raise a large number of children.
So, if you accept those premises, refusing to let women get educated only makes sense. Of course, I was kind of deprecating "attitudes" as a way of explaining things, but have really just identified a deeper and less structured attitude than just wanting to subordinate women, so clearly the real explanation is even deeper than this.
In fiction, we don't usually dig underneath for the contingent material circumstances that constrain and condition the cultural attititudes that affect the characters and their personalities and opinions. Except in science fiction, of course, where sometimes that is the point of the story, and one reason the genre still has unexplored potentialities.
Do I have a story in mind to deal with that issue? Not yet.
The Gardner Dozois anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection came out a couple of days ago. It has one of my stories in it, "Bad Day on Boscobel", set in the same universe as my novels Carve the Sky and River of Dust. It comes from the wonderful anthology The Other Half of the Sky, edited by my friend Athena Andreadis.
As I've mentioned before, Athena is the reason the story exists to begin with, since she asked me to contribute to the anthology, and then, when I was unable to come up with anything, suggested the subject, the life of a certain character, Miriam Kostal, in between the two books (Dust is kind of a prequel to Carve).
This is always a great collection, and I look forward to reading the rest of the stories in it.
And the story itself has generated enough interest that I am thinking about another story with Miriam and the characters she encounters in it. We'll see.
I was on a panel on satire at Readercon last night, and, in response to something my fellow panelist Him Morrow said, I came up with this definition of satire:
"The goal of satire is to describe the Emperor's New Clothes in so much detail that anyone can see they aren't there."
There are a lot of excellent teachers of the craft and trade of writing out there, particularly in my genre, fantastic fiction. Many writer friends of mine teach writing, either occasionally, or as their main money-earning career. On Thursday and Friday I was up at Jeanne Cavelos's Odyssey Writing Workshop, in New Hampshire, where I was a guest speaker for a day.
I have always been reluctant to add that particular arrow to my professional quiver, for a few reasons. First is the fact that there are so many dedicated, talented, and hard-working people already providing the service. The second is that I have a day job, and another skill set, in content marketing, that pays the bills, so any spare time I have I want to devote strictly to the creation of fiction. And third is probably that I did not come up through the residential workshop structure that already existed when I was a new writer, in the form of Clarion, and so have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about being a free-range writer, idiosyncratic and unpolished, with no stake in the system.
Then I try something like a day at Odyssey, and have more fun than I've had in a long time. I do like to perform, and I do have opinions about the writing of fiction, and it was fun to do both with a group of interesting and intelligent people. In some ways, I am at my best when volleying ideas back and forth with other people. Ideas come to me that wouldn't emerge any other way. And, yes, I do like the idea that something I worked out with a student might actually stimulate their own ideas, and lead them to come with things they otherwise would not have.
So, maybe, I might try this more, we'll see. I do need to be careful to position myself in this market as what I really am, kind of an outlier, not necessarily trustworthy or a good example to emulate, but someone who can be entertaining and fun while being respectful of the individual needs of the writers he deals with. Call me the Crazy Uncle of writing workshops. With a well-written warning about potential side effects, I could actually be useful.
Big news from the Gray Lady today: even crayfish get anxious when you shock them. They become less willing to venture out and discover new worlds and new civilizations. After being given a nice Librium, they relax right down and start getting down with exotic alien maidens....
I was just sitting around minding my own business....
The real question is, when is the menace of researchers administering electric shocks to anything that moves, and many things that don't, going to end? I mean, look at that poor thing. They should be ashamed of themselves.
But, now that they've done it, it is another indication about how much our minds depend on relatively simple structures evolved millions of years ago, sometimes for other purposes. And those ancient creatures evolved relatively complicated ways of judging and reacting to reality. That evolutionary environment didn't contain nasty researchers with electric crawdad prods, but it contained things just as nasty.
That's a difficult thing about coming up with a genuine alien. It's not that species that's alien, its the entire lineage it comes from. The reactions come from choices made deep in the forgotten past. Once you start thinking of the complexities of that, you'll never get off the ground.
Often, when you text search a movie title for images from a movie, you see a few iconic images, images from a 70s remake, images of the actors in other movies, images from lists of similar movies, etc. And then there are always the oddballs, images that have some matching text associated with them, but that don't have anything to do with the topic of the original search.
When I wrote my little piece on "The Narrow Margin", I of course searched on the movie title. And, among all the various images that came up, the one below always did.
It's probably because of the margin of victory in 1916, or something, but I prefer to think that search is giving me a clue about the roots of noir, and the kind of overconfident men who think they can handle a situation that is completely beyond them.
"But I just wanted to make the world safe for democracy!"Of course, look at him enough, and he seems a lot more sinister than just the poor schnook who gets his lunch eaten by Henry Cabot Lodge. This is the man behind the guys behind the guys you think are the problem. The star of a new genre: Progressive Noir.
Many lists of great minor noir movies includes the 1952 train-centered The Narrow Margin, where a tough cop from LA is sent to Chicago to secretly escort a mob moll, Mrs. Frankie Neal, back by train so she can testify against her husband's gang. Gangsters get on the train to find her and kill her. The movie is usually described as tight and suspenseful, and, at 71 minutes, goes by fast.
Still, I think it is overrated, for reasons I will go into. People really like it for one thing: the performance of Marie Windsor as the moll.
"You don't like me--but you aren't going to look anywhere else."
You may remember her as the disastrously sexy Sherry Peatty, the unfaithful wife of the Elisha Cook, Jr. character in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 noir, The Killing:
A classic noir marriageWhat happens in The Killing is mostly her fault (as expected). But what is with the "noir bad girl" wig thing? I mentioned this in my discussion of Too Late for Tears a while ago. Fortunately, the actresses compelled to wear these things were hot enough to overcome their disadvantages.
Fortunately, if Windsor's wearing a wig in The Narrow Margin, it is a good one.
Windsor does her wise-ass sparring with Walter Brown, who is as bricklike as his name, and not much of a sparring partner. He is played by Charles McGraw, who has a voice like a cement mixer. He looks and acts a bit like a slowed-down Kirk Douglas, and, what do you know, he played Douglas's gladiatorial trainer in one of my favorite boyhood movies, Spartacus.
Brown comes to Chicago with his older, wiser, more cynical partner, Gus Forbes, to to pick up Mrs. Neil. En route, Forbes asks Brown what he thinks Neil looks like. "A dish," Brown answers. "What kind of dish?" And then we get this classic description:
Translation: "girls are icky."Because who else would marry a hood? But there is a twist in the plot that brings this whole assumption into question. But that twist is not the one that is interesting.
Here at the Chicago apartment, someone is lying is wait, and as Forbes and Brown escort Mrs. Neal out, someone tries to kill her, and kills Forbes instead. Brown gets her safely to the train station, and aboard the train. There she is resentful, and he is angry, sad about his partner, but dedicated to his job. They never do learn to get along:
"I still think you're icky."After this, it's a bunch of hugger mugger, with an innocent woman with one of those annoying 50s children whom Brown befriends, and several overlapping baddies. In fact, one smooth baddy who tries to bribe Brown is then whisked off the train at a station stop and is replaced by another one who flies from Chicago by plane to totally disrupt the "we're all stuck on this narrow train" concept. And, at one point, a car drives parallel to the train on a totally straight road for miles and miles, also messing up the isolation scenario.
The story is really about institutional corruption, not about Mrs. Neal. Everyone is compromised, particularly Forbes. If this was an actual noir, the events of Forbes's death in that Chicago apartment building would be returned to, a couple of times, as it is reinterpreted.
And Mrs. Neal should actually do manipulative, maybe even nasty things in her desperate attempt to survive. There is actually an explanation in the movie for why she doesn't, but it comes late and is just a routine movie reversal rather than something that makes you reexamine all of your assumptions about what's going on. I do like that Brown never warms to her, never likes her, and never even seems to find her hot, which shows something about him, given the fact that they have to live in such close proximity:
A mysterious man on the wall is standing between them: part of the hidden movie.Forbes was clearly on the take. Someone took him out, or he got taken out by accident. And all the playing around in the train has a deeper purpose. I actually think a lot of this was in the story originally, but was removed during rewrites, or edited out to keep the focus on Windsor, and the running around on the train. Fine, I guess, but it leaves a perfectly good noir plot just sitting around, ready to be reused.
Speaking of "running around", at several points Brown is blocked in the narrow corridor by a self-deprecating fat man, Sam Jennings:
"No one likes a fat man except his grocer and his tailor"
There's something to him, but not enough. Potentially another interesting and expanding character.
Good stuff:
Aside from some credits music, there is only ambient sound in this movie, including the portable record player Mrs. Neal plays her jazz records on.
Brown never falls for Mrs. Neil.
Given the limitations of the big cameras they had then, this has amazingly flexible camera work.
In addition to that lacy thing, Mrs. Neal shows why giving up on dresses has made our lives poorer:
No need for a negligee with a dress like this.Oh, look, her hair does look like a terrible wig here. I think I have uncovered the dark truth of noir.
In college I wrote a story called "Fat Boy's Folly" to entertain my friend Bill. I don't actually remember what the story was about, but Bill later put that title on the weight track sheet he had on the wall above his scale. Somehow, though, I don't think I could have competed with Weight Watchers with that title for a business. Tough Love for the Tubby. Nah, that wouldn't work either.
A couple of nights ago, Marilyn, Sherri and saw a more recent version of Fat Boy's Folly, this time called The Whale, at the SpeakEasy in Boston. As it starts, an immensely fat man (actually a normal man in an impressive fat suit) sits in the middle of disgusting piles of old takeout containers, running what sounds like a fairly typical and boring online class where students write meaningless essays about great literary works. Who these people are, why they take this class, and how it works never quite becomes clear.
Class over, the fat man puts on some gay porn, masturbates, and almost has a heart attack. This lets you know you're in a modern work of art.
Then, various people pop in an out of his house: a Mormon missionary with a hidden agenda, a nurse who has a weird affection for this carcase, and a wittily obnoxious long-lost daughter. Later on, ex-wife and mom shows up.
There is a kind of plot, but it's more an actor's play, with some nice scenes, and a bit of a sitcom pace. Mormonism comes in for some whacks (is it really the easiest religion to make fun of?), particularly about its intolerant spirituality. As usual, a gay relationship has some extra oomph that a regular heterosexual relationship wouldn't have, at least to the kind fo audience that goes to a play like The Whale.
There is a cute essay about Moby-Dick that gets read over and over until you realize where it came from at the end. That is cute too, but is paced to seem like some kind of deep revelation.
Overall, not a wasted evening at the theater (Boston has a lot of those, as we know), but not so great either. But the fat suit is pretty amazing.
People who don't like doing something often try to "improve" it, that is, make it more into something they think they might like more.
Bicycling is a perpetual target for people like this. They say that the problems with commuter bicycling are sweat, the clothing, the physical effort, the exclusivist attitude of those who already do it. Usually they come with some way to make bicycling more like a form of transportation they recognize. This usually means adding a motor.
The latest overhyped entry in this field is the FlyKly, a powered bicycle hub you can control with your iPhone. If that last part doesn't seem to make sense, since a handlebar control would be easier, you don't understand how important it is for people to think there's a reason they own those phones. The linked HuffPo article has all sorts of absurd reasons why using a phone to control your bike's speed is "smart", including the fact that it can suggest routes that are "more fun" and help city planners establish bike lanes.
As attempts to make bicycles into something motorized, and thus real transportation, go, the FlyKly is fairly reasonable. The hub weighs nine pounds, which is not bad. I don't believe the claim that it can push you at 20 miles an hour for up to 30 miles on a charge, though.
They never show the derailleur side. So unkempt, like bicyclists themselves.
How many people would bike to work with an electric assist who wouldn't without it? I suspect the number is small. The roads are still dangerous, and your bike can still get stolen. But one of the pleasures of bike commuting is the physical part of it. It feels good to get to work under your own power. But then I already do it, and so am not the target of this product.
On another note, there is the flying bike, debuted in Prague:
Yes, that's a dummy. Right now, real people are too heavy, and too sane.
This thing weighs 190 lbs, has six rotors, and requires 47kW from its hefty batteries. Just for comparison, a bike at 9 mph takes around 30W. Could you get a person on it if there was a pedal assist? This is more something for a movie, to help the main character escape unexpectedly from pursuers, than a really useful thing, but I can see how much fun it must hav been to create it.
Pity the poor bicycle. It's a marvel of subtle technology, though always subject to improvement. A human on a bicycle is the most efficient vehicle available, and uses our own muscles optimally. And yet, it gets no respect from most people. That's kind of fine with me. Things are getting crowded enough out there without people coasting along on electric bikes.
That's actually a listing of presidents following Nixon in a history lesson in 1975's post-apocalyptic teen sex comedy, A Boy and His Dog, based on the Harlan Ellison story (and featuring a talking telepathic dog that could be the reincarnation of Ellison himself). Probably not worth seeking out, though I enjoyed it at the time.
But it could be an account of the last couple of weeks of news. My teenage son asked me if some spectacular new piece of information had surfaced about the assassination, thus justifying the enormous amount of coverage. I had to say that no, there hadn't been. It was a generation mourning itself.
I don't mean to be flip. It was, after all, a tragic and significant event. I just found the focus to be a bit relentless.
Still, a couple of interesting things did appear.
One was this recording of Erich Leinsdorf making the announcement of the assassination to a stunned Boston Symphony audience, and then launching into an impromptu performance of the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.
This is my music. I still remember my parents buying me an LP of a Bernstein/NY Phil recording, with this cover:
Three heavyweights
I've owned a number of recordings since then, but I still remember the pleasure with which I listened to that one. In context, that funeral march is extremely moving, though that may seem odd for someone who grew up outside the context of European concert music. I wonder how many people still remember that particular performance at Symphony Hall?
The second is an eerie HD version of the Zapruder film, which Kottke says was made by someone named Antony Davison, though I see no other references to him online.
A friend who lived in the Soviet Union as a child in the 1960s once told me that there was a TV show there about the United States that played the Zapruder film repeatedly as its opening credits. This is probably the most intensively analyzed 26 seconds of film ever shot, and it still has the power to shock.