P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009)

     P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) The blurb refers to a :perfect marriage of author and subject”, which is hyping this nicely produced book a bit too much. But it was a pleasant read nevertheless. P. D. James breaks no new ground, I’d be surprised if she did. She clearly loves detective fiction more than other crime fiction, and she drops a few useful hints about how she does her own work. It begins with a setting, progresses to the characters, and (we infer) only then do the victim, the perpetrator, and the method emerge from her imaginings.
    James writes a clear and elegant style. What we may have suspected from her fiction, that she’s a cool and sometimes ruthless observer human evil, is here confirmed. Like Poirot, she has a bourgeois attitude to murder: she disapproves of it. She admires Christie’s puzzle-setting plots, but like most readers notes that Christie is weak on psychology and character. I first realised this when I noticed that Christie’s  characters all talk the same bland upper middle class English. James prefers Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh, in that order. I’d put Allingham last, but James’s comments have persuaded me to read more of her work.
All in all, a very pleasant read. ***

Love Finds A Home (2009)

     Love Finds A Home (2009) (D: Dane Peterson. Sarah Jones, Haylie Duff, Jordan Bridges, Patty Duke] This movie is irritating, and that’s an understatement. The story is quite good, involving family conflict, generational conflict, medical emergency, personal griefs, etc. The setting is a Missouri town sometime in the late 19th century. The main characters are a Belinda, a doctor and Lee her blacksmith husband, plus Lillian their adopted daughter; the doctor’s pregnant friend Annie (also a doctor), the latter’s mother-in-law Mary, an opinionated mid-wife; Josh, the new apprentice to the blacksmith; and assorted secondary characters. So what’s wrong with this movie?
     Plenty. For one thing, the appalling anachronisms, starting with the two women doctors. Women doctors were extremely rare in the late 1800s. The characters generally are imaginary 20th century Americans of a certain type dressed up in 19th century costumes. There’s a scene where the pregnant friend sits in the living room in deshabille while men are present, which violates so many social norms of the time that it’s ludicrous.
     The sets are off kilter in so many ways it’s painful. The doctor’s house is a nice 20th century two-story with a porch and hanging baskets, painted white, in a yard with no visible outbuildings for the horses, or even a chicken coop to house the birds whose clucking signals morning, every morning. The kitchen is, well it ain’t a late 19th century kitchen. The blacksmith and his apprentice are shown “working”, banging on unidentifiable objects made of some metal or other. The town lacks paint, and its dusty ambience indicates the Southwest, not Missouri. Merchants around 1890 would have made a point of painting their false fronted stores in order to impress the customers.
     Then there’s the acting, which is at best intermittently competent. Not that the writing gives the actors much to work with. How many times can a doctor say “I’m a doctor, I know...”? The only one who actually understands her stereotype of a character, and plays it well, is Patty Duke.
     And the music. Intrusive is an understatement. Maybe the producers realised how awful the script was and thought that folksy sentimental tunes would carry the movie where the writing failed.
     The underlying problem is that the producers wanted to make a wholesome “family movie”. They seem to understand that as a movie that leaves out all the bad stuff that mainstream movies include. They don’t include what would have made this an interesting movie, and possibly a good one: the doubts that believers face when they don’t get what they want, when faith seems at best a mild anodyne. There’s a very brief reference to the pains of childbirth as the punishment for Eve’s role in the Fall, with a hint of disagreement with that reading of Genesis. It’s not followed up. The blurb says “...Belinda [the doctor] looks to a higher power...”, which indicates the producers’ aims. That higher power shows up in a pastor who appears at odd intervals to dispense bromides, three prayers, and four or five references to God. Religion and faith, and the doubts and conflicts that mark a life of faith, are simply not present in the story, let alone integrated into it. Yet the few hints show that faith is supposed to be essential to the characters. Why the almost total absence of a defining trait of the characters, of the essence of the story? Was it because a “family movie” mustn’t trigger questions of the kind that adults don’t want their children to ask? That’s my suspicion.
     You can’t make even mediocre art if your focus is on “values” rather than story and character. ½

Bread (Comment)

     Bread
     13-02-2013
     Bread is called the staff of life. When I was a kid, I thought of a staff as made of wood. A staff made of bread made no sense. That was before I understood metaphors of function: just as a staff supports a man, so bread supports life.
But in fact through most of human existence, there was no bread. The earliest archeological evidence for bread of a sort is about 30,000 years old. By that time homo sapiens had existed for at least 200,000 years. That bread was a cooked or semi-roasted porridge made of grains; I don’t think anyone nowadays would recognise it as bread. Flatbread baked on hot stones or a griddle are the modern equivalent. The archeology shows that these first bread makers relied on hunting and gathering for most of their food. Cereal grains were one among several types of seeds gathered for food. It took several thousand years to develop cultivation of grains; perhaps someone noticed that spilled grain would provide a crop the following year, and decided to experiment. However it began, that invention or discovery began the constantly accelerating development of technology that has made our species the dominant life form on this planet.
     Bread as staple food and agriculture go together, in fact agriculture makes no sense without bread. The earliest agricultural settlements were villages, some fortified, some not, surrounded by fields and pastures. The last users of stone tools built them about 10,000 years ago. When metallurgy was invented around 3500BCE, that technology developed swiftly, and within a few hundred years we find cities dominating the farming villages in their vicinity. These complex polities require writing, an armed force, and centrally administered law to survive.
     I think it’s no accident that the invention of bread and the earliest forms of writing, mnemonic symbols, are nearly contemporary. These symbols were used to help the reader recall everything from lists of trade goods to signs of future events to myths, those stories in which the sacred and secular histories of the tribe were mingled. Surprisingly quickly, these early mnemonic systems developed into scripts.
     Bread as staple requires agriculture, which requires a hierarchical social structure to ensure that the backbreaking (and boring) work of plowing, seeding, and harvest was done. A hierarchical society needs an agreed body of rules and customs. Law, in other words, enforced as much by common beliefs as by physical force. Customs, religious and otherwise, express the common understanding of how the world does and should work. Written law codifies those beliefs; the law describes what is to be done and what is not to be done. Writing is also handy for keeping accounts, so much so that writing numbers may have predated writing words.
     Bread is not only the staff of life, it’s the driver of those changes in human society that we are pleased to label progress.

Spike Milligan. Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974)

     Spike Milligan. Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974) Part two of Milligan’s memoir of his service in the Royal Artillery, covers the campaign that ended in the taking of Tunis. I haven’t found the other parts of what eventually became a seven part “trilogy”. He passes briefly over the horrors, quotes a good deal of banter, much of which was in the style made famous by The Goon Show. I doubt the quotations are verbatim, but am pretty sure their represent the style. Milligan punctuates his narrative with pictures (almost all of them of colonial armies), and “telegrams” from Hitler, etc.
     I get the impression that Milligan wrote the memoirs for his comrades. War marked him forever, as it did all those of his generation. Maintaining contact with comrades was for many of them the only anchor in a world made surreal in contrast to what they endured. Kurt Vonnegut’s books have the same kind of surreality as this and other  Milligan writing. All in all, a book worth reading, both by Milligan fans and by students of military history. ***

Margaret Atwood. Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)

Margaret Atwood. Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994) A nicely made little book of some of Atwood’s shards and fragments: Variations on fairy tales, meditations, dialogues between unnamed characters, micro-tales, and so on. Atwood is very clever, every one of these bits succeeds. A pleasure to read. I liked The Little Red Hen Tells All, for example, which gives us a reversal of the usual plot. These items are clearly experiments of one kind or another, playful rewritings, games played with current themes and topics, but each shows us a powerful imagination, a clear-eyed wit, and, despite what that wit observes, a merry heart. ***

Hans Windisch. Die Neue Foto-Schule (1940)

     Hans Windisch. Die Neue Foto-Schule (1940) Windisch pronounces on the right way to take photographs, develop film, and print enlargements. There is an immense amount of technical data here. Windisch suffers from the German awe of the “Fachmann”, the person with special, expert knowledge, and exhibits a corresponding disdain for the layman, who, he says, is merely a “Roboter” when he follows rules and guidelines without knowing the technical basis for them. In other words, the tone of this book is offensive, however much useful data it contains. And much of the data was even more useful back then, when a good deal of the chemistry of film photography was still being explored, and manufacturing techniques weren’t capable of the consistent high quality that became available after the war.
     Windisch is a born teacher; his explications of the theory underlying the technology are models of clarity. It’s a pity his tone is that of the superior expert deigning to share his knowledge with the humble bumbling amateur. He is also quite vain. Over half of the photos he offers as examples are his, and he is, at best, merely capable. He has good technique but no art. This may be related to his belief that the art of photography were merely a matter of sound understanding of some underlying science.
     A series of pictures with text is offered as an example of how to tell a story through pictures. It’s quite good, except for its subject and tone. It consists of a number of head shots taken of the man who is rowing the photographer and his wife across Lake Chiem to an island. The man is talking about his former girlfriend, who gave him some troubles. “But not to worry – there are plenty of others where she came from”. This is told in Windisch’s version of the Bavarian dialect. I suppose he thought it was humorous, and such, but it comes across as condescending to the man and nastily indifferent to his wife, who is listening to the story, too.
     An interesting and curious book, not least because of the high quality of printing and paper. The war-induced shortages had not yet hit German life in 1940. *** for the technical content, 0 for everything else. (2006)

E. W. Buxton, ed. Points of View (1967)

     E. W. Buxton, ed. Points of View (1967) A collection of essays intended for senior high school. It’s clear that 40 years ago senior high school was still seen as serious education, and not merely the accumulation of credits for admission to the post-secondary training grounds. Buxton and his collaborator start with Montaigne and Bacon, and continue with a well done survey of the essay in English from the 1700s to the 1960s. Almost all the selections are worth reading still; only the most recent ones, from the mid-20th century, show that when it comes to recognising classics, it’s not an advantage to be a contemporary of the writer. I read almost all the essays, though, and enjoyed them. ** to *** (2006)