Murder in the Napa Valley: Bitter Finish by Linda Barnes

Linda Barnes. Bitter Finish (1983) Michael Spragge, scion of a rich Boston clan, actor, sometime P.I., partner in a California winery, answers a summons for help from his business partner and sometime lover. The winemaker has gone missing. A nearly headless corpse found in a derelict car on the winery estate isn’t him. Etc and so on and so forth.
     The book’s an almost page-turner, a mildly amusing entertainment, one of Barnes’ first attempts at a crime series, reissued when her value as a crime writer rose high enough. She followed up the Spraggue series with ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle, a better imagined character. *½

Homo musicis: Why humans make music

Daniel Levitin. This is Your Brain on Music (2006) Levitin was in the music business in LA for many years, but discovered a yen for understanding what it was all about. So he became a neurologist, believing that understanding how the brain works when we make or respond to music would explain it all. It doesn’t, but it comes close.
     Music is species-specific behaviour: only humans make music.We could label oursleves homo musicis. Other animals use sounds for communication and for courtship displays, but none, as far as we can tell, play around with sound-sequences like we do. Not even whales.
     Every known culture and society has music. The three features of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. What’s interesting is how we perceive them. Rhythm is built on sequences of strong and weak beats. We recognise the same rhythm whether played fast or slow. Melody is a sequence of intervals, not notes: we recognise the same melody whether played with higher or lower notes. Harmony in the sense of timbre is omni-present: human voices and all musical instruments generate different combinations of overtones in addition to the main tone. Think of chords as deliberately created and controlled overtone groups. Then a melody becomes a sequence of chords combined with a rhythm. By the way, a melody can be played with different rhythms. And in every culture, music and dance are connected. You can’t have one without the other. (The Western habit of suppressing movement while listening to a performance is a relatively short-lived aberration.)
     Levitin sees two puzzles: First, how do we perceive and produce music? Second, how come music is such an apparently necessary part of human experience? Even people who are tone-deaf experience music as more or less pleasurable. Neurology provides some of the answers. Every part of the brain is involved when we make or listen to music. The cerebellum controls repetitive movements. The cortex plans them, and generates expectations. The limbic system supplies both the memory and the emotions. (It’s unclear just how many melodies we can recognise, for most of us it’s in the hundreds.) The auditory system decodes the complex wave-forms of the sounds of music, and delivers the results to other areas of the brain that recognise melody, rhythm, harmony, and the words of a song. Music is intimately connected with movement and language.
     We use music to build community. Although we can make it a solitary pursuit, it is first and foremost a collective one. We sing together, we dance together, we make music in groups. We prefer the music of our ingroup. Music is part of our courtship behaviour. It persists in our memories after dementia has destroyed almost every other part of our selves. A fragment of a song will trigger memories, and the emotions that accompany them. Music is such a pervasive part of our individual and collective experience that we take it for granted, and hardly realise how much it shapes our lives.
     As you can see, it’s complicated. Levitin has become a premier researcher in the neurology of music. Every result raises new questions. This book is now 14 years old, and recent work on questions of consciousness, mental health, the role of emotions, dementia, etc, have superseded some of his insights, but on the whole I think it’s an excellent introduction to music as a human endeavour. Levitin is an academic, so he tends to pile on the details, but that’s the only flaw in a very good book. Recommended. ***

Photos lead to murder

Linda Barnes. Snapshot (1993) PI Carlotta Carlyle takes on a job to investigate the circs around a beloved child’s death. Someone steals her garbage cans. A nurse is found murdered. Some creep makes friends with Paolina. And so it goes, in a well-plotted tale with a satisfying conclusion and enough detail and ambience to keep our disbelief agreeably suspended. Carlotta gets her garbage cans back, too.
      Found this Carlyle novel at the food bank’s permanent yard sale, if I find any more, I’ll read them too. **½

Boston Irish with Dreams: A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes

Linda Barnes. A Trouble of Fools (1987) The fools are a bunch of Boston Irish cabbies with delusory dreams of reviving the Irish troubles and shoving the Brits out of Ireland. These dreams entangle them in an illicit local enterprise. Carlotta Carlyle, ex-cop and near-indigent P.I., stumbles on the mess when the sister of one of the cabbies asks her to find her missing brother. An FBI sting attempt designed to flush out a drug dealer complicates matters. Carlyle’s private life doesn’t help much, either. Her stint as a cabbie does help, and all’s well that ends well. Almost: the missing brother does turn up, dead at the bottom of the harbour. But we knew something like that would happen.
     A briskly written and plotted entertainment. Carlyle isn’t quite up to the standard of Kinsey Milhone et al, but she plays in the same league. **½

Wexford and Burden monitor a Rock Concert. A corpse spoils the party.

 Some Lie and Some Die (1973) A Rock Concert near Kingsmarkham attracts tens of thousand of (mostly) young people. On the last day, a pair of lovers discover a badly battered body in the small quarry on the edge of the estate. Wexford and Burden use their usual mix of dogged police work (mostly done by coppers off stage), intuition, and psychological insight. We learn a few more details of their back stories (Burden is a widower, Wexford is edging towards retirement), but on the whole this is a potboiler. It feels as if it’s perhaps adapted from another story idea, since it features Rendell’s interest is psycho-pathology. A good quick read, but not her best Wexford. **
    Ruth Rendell.

Post-election comments II

 A comment on my 2015 pre-election musings:

The only prediction in that 2015 post that turned out to be valid is implied in the last sentence. Harper managed to keep the far right and centre right together. Andrew Scheer couldn't do that. The attack on his leadership came from the far right.

Two elections later: Trudeau enjoyed a majority from 2015 to 2019, and now must manage with a minority. The Conservatives are the official opposition, but the deep fault lines between the centre right and the far right in that party have become visible in the attack on Andrew Scheer. They will co-operate or abstain on issues with broad public support, and will reiterate their tax-cutting mantras.

The Greens don't have enough votes to make a difference, but Trudeau will certainly co-opt them for good optics whenever he can. The Bloc Quebecois and the NDP have little common policy, and so will bargain for different goodies. At some point, both will tire of the game, and one or the other will trigger an election when they think the polls show an advantage for them.

This will not be a minority government that will do much for most of us. We Canadians are centre-left, but we've caiught the anti-tax infection from south of the border. This government will try to woo the West, risking loss of support in the rest of Canada (which is getting rather tired of Alberta whinging because  its economy has declined to only slightly better than the rest of the country). A past politician observed that Canada has too much geography. True. And that's what makes it difficult to govern.

Dave Brubeck at 91: Take Five at Montreal in 2009.

 

Just listened, again, to this Dave Brubeck version of Take Five at the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival. He was 91. IMO this version is the best ever. It's 10 minutes long, so be prepared.

Joe Leaphorn, retired, solves a cold case

Tony Hillerman. The Fallen Man (1996) A skeleton found high up a nearly unclimbable mesa closes a missing persons case, but loose threads prompt a search for a truth that’s inconvenient for many people. One group retains Joe Leaphorn, now retired and a “civilian”, to investigate. A murder and an attempted murder complicate matters, the resolution raises the issue of law versus justice, and throughout the Navajo desire to restore harmony controls both Leaphorn’s attitude and our understanding of the story. Jim Chee, now acting lieutenant, has relationship problems, and must mentor a new recruit who is all gung-ho to catch a cattle rustler.
    
The parts make a satisfying whole that’s more than their sum. The narrative pace is relaxed, but relentless. Hillerman is careful and fair with the clues. We discover new information at the same pace as Leaphorn and Chee. For me, the Four Corners became real not only as a desert landscape, but as a community. Navajo culture is attractive. ****

Latest Monty Python Skit: Brexit: Britain 'will not be aligning with EU rules' - Raab

The UK will not be aligning itself with EU rules, according to Dominic Raab.

It's become impossible to satirise the delusions of the Brexiteers. You just can't make this stuff up.

Update Wednesday, 5th February 2020: Here's a link to The Toronto Star's Michael de Adder. (Published Monday, Feb 20.) I think it captures the delusions of the Brexiteers perfectly.