Wordless compressed narratives

I mentioned yesterday that I would be back to Up. Near its beginning Up uses an interesting self-contained narrative block, a “wordless compressed narrative” that gains emotional power by what it leaves out. Up uses it to good effect by showing the unremarkable life of a married couple and giving it heft by compressing it into a series of moving snapshots.

WALL-E did this, in a relatively uncompressed form, showing the robot’s routines before they are interrupted. And Saving Private Ryan did it in the Omaha Beach scene that starts the movie. There it is a few hours over a wide area compressed into a tight series of scenes.

Aside from their impressive quality, these three sections share something else: they are all much better than their succeeding movies. Saving Private Ryan becomes a fairly routine WWII movie, with a few annoying Hallmark Card intrusions by the manipulative Spielberg. WALL-E turns into a limp satire of consumerism with cute anthropomorphic robots. I think people were seduced by that first half hour and neglected to be bothered by its other problems. And Up...

Up, I would say, does not fall down as badly, but does tie itself up into mundane narrative knots by the need for an evil protagonist, in this case a lost explorer who, by the order of events, has to be at least a century old, and murders other explorers so he can be the first to find a specimen of a large bird. All that takes a lot of narrative time which would have been better spent just exploring and having adventures. And developing the characters of Karl and Russell, who really could have handled it.

This method has been used interstitially, as in the snapshot flips in Run, Lola, Run, and the character bios Jean-Pierre Jeunet used in Ameilie and A Very Long Engagement, but those were all short.  I'm sure the method has been around for a while, but I can't remember seeing it before, particularly at the same length ( something like half an hour in the case of Ryan).  I’m not up on recent cinema (except, obviously, those I take my kids to).

When bad henchmen happen to good villains

I saw Up the other night, with my wife and daughter. I liked it fine, but certainly did not think of it as one of the great works of art of our era, as others seem to have.

I’ll deal with some of those issues later. Right now, I want to point out a recurrent character arrangement that is characteristic of most children’s films, and seems to have crept into books as well. It certainly appeared in this one.

It’s this: the evil character, villain, criminal mastermind, bully, whoever, always has two moronic, clueless sidekicks. The leader doesn’t have sinister henchmen, resentful slaves, or co-opted intellectual ideologues. He has buffoons, always two.

I first noticed this in the weirdly complex and deranged Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000). The evil Diesel has doofus locomotives to admire his evil, provide comic relief, and execute commands poorly and incompetently, giving the heroes a chance to succeed. Its plot ease and comic relief that are the real functions.

In wartime propaganda, the enemy leader’s minions are often portrayed as incompetent toadies, cowards, sexual perverts (not common in children’s versions, at least openly, though sometimes appearing as fetishistic attachment to some object or procedure), cross-dressers, and sufferers from obscure and embarrassing maladies. Think of Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering in WWII propaganda.

What’s interesting about this scheme is not whether or not it makes sense in real life (Goebbels and Goering were evil, but far from comical and incompetent), but how stereotyped and unvarying it is. It ranges from Crabbe and Goyle in the Harry Potter books to the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo, with his hammerhead and mako companions. You could lift the pop-culture-laden, befuddled dialog from one movie and plop it down in another and not even notice.

Ticklish tasks: setting up a reader and a writer

You know how it is. If you mention a writer you like to someone without suggesting a specific work, your friend will invariably be drawn to the worst hackwork that writer has ever perpetrated—some Scooby-Doo tie-in book, or a late completely unedited doorstop bestseller dedicated to a much younger third spouse, or the subsequent comic novel set in academia with a recognizable grudge character based on that unfortunate late-period spouse.

But recommending the best, or most representative work might not be a great idea either. Any more than the first book of a series is always the best choice. Some writers get worse as the series goes on. Others get better. Some hit slumps and then come back stronger than before.

For example, I discovered the mystery writer Reginald Hill’s Dalziel/Pascoe novels midway through, with Bones and Silence. That turned out to be an excellent choice. That middle period of D/P novels, from that book to On Beulah Height (including Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection, and The Wood Beyond) are a perfect blend of detective novel and literary game playing. Before that they are more standard, though still good; past that the literary game playing takes over and they make less and less sense as actual detective novels.

Sheer luck on my part. Otherwise I might not have taken to him like I did.

When Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels came out, a reviewer said it was fine, but that Fifth Business was much better, and the best place to start. The reviewer was right, and I’ve since read almost everything Davies has ever written. Even the less-good stuff is great, but I might not feel that way if I’d tried to start with The Rebel Angels.

One collection of recommendations for mystery novels I saw posted in a mystery bookstore recommended starting the Lord Peter Whimsey books with Gaudy Night, possibly the best way to put someone off Sayers for life. I started with Strong Poison, perhaps not the best place, but it worked for me. I’d say start before Harriet Vane appears, probably Murder Must Advertise, and work your way toward her. Not Five Red Herrings either, unless you have a fetish for train schedules.

Pynchon? The Crying of Lot 49 is an obvious choice (short!), but I’d say V.: if you can’t take the length, stay out of the Pynchon.

David Foster Wallace? The Broom of the System (TCOL49 updated), his two great early travel essays “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”. Try a story, and if you don’t like it in a few pages, try another, because it’s not going to change. Wallace short stories are weirdly isotropic, no matter how long they are. They’re the Red Queen’s Read: you’ll run through a lot of words but you’ll end up in the same place.  If you like that place, great.  If you don't, leave.

And Jack Vance, mentioned in several other posts?  I'd say The Star King, then into the Demon Princes series, though The Blue World is a good standalone.  And here's where reader preferences really do need to be consulted.  Someone with a bent to fantasy might prefer Lyonesse.  But the wrong choice can really put someone off him.  That's actually what started me thinking about this.  Years ago I recommended Vance, and a friend went to The Gray Prince, a weird and twisted little work, a precursor to his later "cosy genocide" manner, which I found a bit off-putting, for Vance completists only.

So, if you can, ask.  And heed warnings as well as recommendations.

When is it worth updating a classic?

This week I went to a performance of Pirates! (yes, the exclamation point is in the original), a "modernization" of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.  It was not as bad as you might think, largely because the performers and orchestra were good, and most of the music (if not the book) remained.  They even bootlegged in the Lord Chancellor's nightmare song from Iolanthe to open the second act, to good effect.

The modernization involved pretty much what you might think:  sexual references, throwing up, references to colonialism, some more sexual references, including jokes about virgins and the difficulty of finding them older than the original operetta, and some "topical" mentions.  The Pirate King was played as Johnny Depp doing Jack Sparrow, something I'm sure even Johnny Depp is tired of.

Since Gilbert was always topical, it makes sense that those of us not enamored of the cultural details of the Victorian Era would enjoy having references updated. But there is an inherent problem of cultural production here.

Since Gilbert was a genius, you have to be pretty good for your modern patches not to seem even dimmer than they are by contrast to the bright intricacy of his language.  But if you're good enough to match Gilbert's quality, you're good enough to be doing your own work.  So such updatings are either the leisure exercises of people known for other things, or second-rate work by those who have nothing original to contribute.  In this case, it is very much the latter.

All in all, not the root canal of an experience that some recent Huntington productions have been.  But my friends and I have decided not to resubscribe next year, and instead explore a selection of other performances around town.  That's our power in this case:  exit.

The universal appeal of Jack Vance

As I mentioned below, I grew up as a big fan of Jack Vance.  I found him so eccentric that I'm always surprised to find how many other fans of his there are.  Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, on one of my favorite blogs, Less Wrong, praises him, in a blog entry on whether awfulness is a requirement for intense fandom.   His point:  Vance was not awful, in fact was a real craftsman, and still has intense fans.

Well, I don't know how intense.  And there always comes that terrible question about one's youthful loves:  can an adult read them?  Vance's prose, widely praised, is ornate, bookish, and arch, very much a specialized taste.  One of my favorite passages, still resonant after all these years, is from The Palace of Love, the third of the Demon Princes novels.  Edelrod, a poisoner from a planet of poisoners, explains a poison that looks like a lump of gray wax:

Observe this deadly material.  I can handle it without fear:  I am immunized!  But if you were to rub it on an article belonging to your enemy--his comb, his ear-scraper--he is as good as gone.  Another application is to spread a film over your identification papers.  Then, should an overofficious administrator hector you, he is contaminated, and pays for his insolence.

The exclamation mark is also a characteristic of the dialogue of Bruce Sterling, now that I think about it.  Not an obvious successor, but there is a connection when you look.

Vance's plots are collections of coincidences and misunderstandings, his favored women seductive and remote,  his cultures each built around some key obsession, his aristocrats pompous and bumbling, his aliens genuinely weird, and his novels journeys through beautiful and elegant puzzles.  I see Gene Wolfe as the closest thing to an adult Vance.

And, of course, he has been an influence on me.

Monument to a forgotten figure

One of my...hobbies, interests, whatever, is public sculpture. I was just down in Washington DC with my family, and got to see a lot of it. I favor the period roughly 1870-1920, which seemed to have developed a style and training regimen which allowed for a large number of skilled practitioners to be working across the country at the same time. As I travel, I find work even in small towns that is of astoundingly high quality.

Take a look at this:

This is part of a memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, one of the most respected figures of the late 19^th century, now bulking nowhere near so large as his greatest opponent in the field, Robert E. Lee. It stands on the high end of the Mall in Washington DC, just below the Capitol, looking out to the memorial to his boss, Abraham Lincoln.

It took twenty years for the sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady to study and create the two dynamic groups of mounted soldiers and the gigantic statue of Grant on his horse Cincinnati (supposedly the third-largest equestrian statue in the world), along with some lions, reliefs, and other features.  If you've never heard of Shrady (I hadn't) it might be because he died two weeks before the monument was dedicated.  He deserves to be better known.

To my eyes, the work is startlingly Hellenistic, rather than Classical.  The cavalry group on Grant's right and the artillery group on his left struggle dramatically through mud.  Every body part of horse and man is torqued, exhibiting force and movement.  Garments flap, faces are contorted.  You feel the terror and stink of the Overland Campaign.

Here is the cavalry group:

Here is an artilleryman's face:

For his part, Grant sits with grim calm, his hat foursquare on his head.  He was a man who needed impending disaster to be able to relax.

The monument, though dramatic, has trouble holding its space.  It looks a bit of an afterthought, and I gather that changes have occurred around it.  The sculpture can't manage the space alone--no sculpture can.  It could use a flight of stairs or a colonnade.  It wouldn't even need to be architecturally distinguished to do the job.  The new National WWII monument, elsewhere on the Mall, is pretty much a decorative fountain (big in monuments nowadays), but its big blocky columns with their metal wreaths define the dedicated space effectively.

Wikipedia entry on the memorial.

Some other photos, not by me.

Metafictional Ferrellism: Stranger Than Fiction

A few days ago, I watched the movie Stranger Than Fiction with my son. It’s a metafictional story, where a person recognizes he is the character in a work of fiction, and struggles to escape. It was pretty OK. The character, an IRS employee, is played by Will Ferrell, the writer by Emma Thompson, ragged-haired, chain smoking, un-made-up. The literary theorist Ferrel goes to for help is played by Dustin Hoffman, somewhat reprising a similar role in I (Heart) Huckabees, a movie I enjoyed a great deal more than this one.

There was a lot to like, though I was disappointed by how superficial Hoffman’s analysis and critique are: there are all sorts of questions of genre, audience expectations, and issues of characterization (“it’s weird, but I’ve really started noticing what brand of pen people use”) that he could use to figure out the author’s identity, but he focuses on the phrase “Little did he know...”, a wooden piece of foreshadowing that makes the writer seem pretty industrial grade.

But let’s talk about Thompson’s writer. She hasn’t published a book in ten years, and, from Hoffman’s professorial admiration of her, you figure she’s a literary writer, not big on sales. Nevertheless, her publisher sends an enforcer, played by Queen Latifah, to get her to finish her book. This smooth woman gets paid a fulltime salary to bring highbrow midlist authors to parturition, a character who could only have been invented by a writer who knew nothing about the writing business. Or maybe it is a blocked writer’s greatest fantasy: “my unwritten book is so important that everyone’s greatest interest is that I finish it”. Latifah doesn’t get enough to do, either as a character, or in the plot. She’s mostly someone for the writer to explain things to.

But what story is Ferrell in, if he’s not in a metafictional one? Thompson’s book seems immensely dull without the character’s revolt, down to the irritatingly self-righteous baker, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom Ferrell audits, and whose life-affirming joy warms Ferrell from his useless, enclosed life...well, you’ve been there a hundred times before. “Why am I suddenly meeting only wooden, stereotyped characters? And why do I feel compelled to explain everything to you, even though I barely know you?”

Charlie Kauffman is the master of this kind of thing. For real metafiction fun, Synecdoche, New York is the movie to see, probably more than once.

How long will we keep going to plays?

I am a longtime playgoer. I have had a subscription at the Huntington Theater in Boston for more years than I care to think about, and for many years had one at the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge.

I love plays. I also love trains, and my experiences on Amtrak are, regrettably similar to my recent experiences in playgoing.

Last night I saw The Miracle at Naples, by David Grimm. It is set in Naples in 1580, in is what suppose could be called a “comic romp”: a commedia dell’arte troupe comes to Naples, and the various members get into various scrapes, mostly sexual. There are some vague attempts to connect what happens to the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Gennaro, a local tourist draw, but the blood is eventually forgotten. It has the vaguely limp feel of the comic relief sections of a Jacobean drama, without the drama. There is nothing even vaguely 16^th century about the characters, their issues, or their reactions. There is no plot, no real characters, and few good jokes. But the stage set, a courtyard dominated by a huge statue of St. Gennaro as bishop, was incredible, using perspective to make it look like the courtyard extended way back behind the stage.  But, as Dorothy Parker supposedly once said, the actors kept getting in front of it.

The play, to use a precise critical term, sucked. Most of the new plays the Huntington puts on suck. Some are just inept, while others are active offenses to the soul. The previous one we saw, Two Men of Florence, was a painfully earnest and labored play about Galileo (what do these people have about the 16^th century?) by Richard Goodwin, speech writer to JFK and husband to Doris Kearns. This too had a great set, with a big turntable, stars that appeared in the sky, and dramatic experimental apparatus. But man was it dull. Not bad. Not even inept. Someone in a play workshop would probably feel justifiably proud of having written it. But it had no business wasting the time of a bunch of good actors (including Edward Hermann) or an audience, as part of a season of works to which we are supposed to pay attention.

Even the fairly good new plays by new authors the Huntington has put on (Sonia Flew by Melinda Lopez, Boleros for the Disenchanted by Jose Rivera, Well by Lisa Kron) suffer from poor structure, lack of ambition, and a kind of easy spiritual uplift. And the bad ones (most notably Persephone by Noah Haidle) are almost mesmerizingly bad. You have to rely on established writers, like Theresa Rebeck, Tom Stoppard, and David Lindsay-Abaire to get anything maybe worth watching.

Why should younger writers go for the theater?  There's more fun to be had, and more money to be made, in TV and movies, not to mention video games, YouTube videos, and corporate training videos.  I presume they write them as prestige resume builders.

So why do I go? I like to go to the theater, I like getting together for dinner with my friends, and I am always hopeful. But that hope is not immortal. And it’s not like the Huntington’s choices are bringing them in: playgoers are a graying demographic, and the performance I attended was more than half empty.

I keep wondering if I’ll ever have the nerve to boo and catcall. Routine standing ovations show that the form is moribund. Hearing a boo might reassure people that it still lives.

Who’s with me?

Beware the writer who teaches writing

I observe that other writers love to teach readers about writing.  I "observe" this, because I don't share the urge to run writing workshops, give seminars on writing, write books about how to write, or even give blog tips on pronoun usage.  Truth in ranting:  I do belong to a peer writing workshop, where I give criticism in order to receive it, so, at some level, I am complicit in the system.

In other entries, I've talked about the sins of writing:  the ways writers consistently and persistently convey reality incorrectly, either through the inherent problems of fiction, or their own mental inadequacy, or (ahem) the unreasonable demands of their readers.

To the extent that teaching writing does the same thing, and is effective at doing it--explain to the would-be writer how to convey reality, or inner states, or fantastic situations, or suspense better in functional and elegant prose-- to that extent does it risk ruining the reading experience.  Why?  Because most writers aren't much good at most of that stuff.

I've become an enormously sensitive reader over the years.  I don't mean perceptive, or anything else virtuous.  I mean princess-and-the-pea sensitive.  Bad sentences leave me queasy, even if the plot is suspenseful.  Characters introduced to exemplify some flaw, and be bested by the virtuous protagonist, infuriate me.  And this last is used way too frequently in my field, speculative fiction.  I won't go on.

But most readers of writing manuals, most attendees at writing workshops, most readers of blogs with writing tips, will not become writers.  They will stay readers.  But they will be more demanding readers.  This may seem good.  Moving the demand curve upward for better-quality writing will increase supply of same.

But I fear that all it does is make you unhappy with what used to be simple pleasures.  I read many popular books in my field and see what makes people like them, without being able to share in that pleasure, because I don't see why the writer couldn't have done the rest of the job up to the same quality.  But the cheerfully clueless readers are made happy by the books, because they don't care about those other issues.

So, beware, you writing students.  Your teachers are actually teaching you to read.  And once you learn how to do it, you can never go back.  Do you really want to make most science fiction and fantasy seem like unreadable dreck?  Whatever will you do with your time?  And how will you talk with your friends?  It will all seem like a lover after the end of the affair, all irritating snorts, bad habits, missed birthdays, and unbearable self-righteousness.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Long book, great crime

A couple of days ago I mentioned lengthy titles and subtitles, a style now vanished.  I was reminded of a favorite takedown of a long-winded writer by Thomas Macaulay (no stranger to length himself), in a review of a book on Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister for decades, by the unfortunate Rev. Edward Nares.  Macaulay writes:

The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with the astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when he first landed in Brobdignag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys.  The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale.  The title is as long as an ordinary preface;  the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book;  and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library.

...

Compared to the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is agreeable recreation.

He goes on from there, destroying in detail once the ground is softened up with rhetoric, and Dr. Nares, no doubt, never showed his face again.

Macaulay is also irritated with Nares for his extoling of Burghley's moral virtue, and his account of a politic and wily minister amid the shifting sands of the Reformation can't be bettered:

He never deserted his friends till it was very inconvenient to stand by them, was an excellent Protestant when it was not very advantageous to be a Papist, recommended a tolerant policy to his msitress as strongly as he could recommend it without hazarding her favour, never put to the rack any person from whom it did not seem probable that useful information could be derived, and was so moderate in his desires that he left only three hundred distinct landed estates, though he might...have left much more.

For a politician, this is virtue.  The rest of the essay is a delicate anatomizing of the perils of the period, and of how the Tudors ruled, "a popular government, under the forms of despotism".  Nares is forgotten, as the ostensible reasons for Macaulay's essays so often are, except for a last smack when Macaulay says he must stop, lest his essay

...swell to a bulk exceeding that of other reviews, as much as Dr. Nares's book exceeds the bulk of all other histories."

The slipperiness of truth

I wrote some thoughts about truth and prevarication in personal nonfiction yesterday, and, primed for the topic, found myself on the train to work reading an essay in The New York Review of Books about the essays of George Orwell, "Such, Such Was Eric Blair", by Julian Barnes, in which he discusses the question of the truth, or lack of same, in Orwell's account in "Shooting An Elephant", about his days in Burma.

As Barnes says, of Orwell:

...he taught us that even if 100 percent truth is unobtainable, then 67 percent is and always will be better than 66 percent, and that even such a small percentage point is a morally nonnegotiable unit.

Then Barnes sets out doubts, about the elephant, about a hanging, even about the wretched school so vividly described in "Such, Such Were The Joys".  The elephant was shot, but had not killed a man, and the consequences to Orwell were negative and damaged his reputation.  The hanging was a "composite", that dreaded journalistic crime that got Janet Cooke sacked from the Washington Post back in 1981.  And the school wasn't as bad as described.

The school I won't discuss:  our experiences at school, or in a family, can be horrible and completely different from the person we sit next to at lunch, or our sibling, so different that conversation about what happened may be forever impossible, outside of novels or intimate essays.

But the other two.... According to Barnes, David Lodge (one of my favorite writers, as it happens) argues

...that the value of the two Burmese essays does not rest on their being factually true.

Except that it does.  It may not rest solely on the facts, because it also rests on prose and structure.  The facts are not sufficient.  But they are necessary.  That one percent does matter.  Even if your readers, even if they are as astute and thoughtful as David Lodge, want you to trade truth for something they think they value more.

Is there such a thing as personal nonfiction?

Nonfiction exists as a category, of course.  I'm reading Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea, about the 16th century struggle in the Mediterranean between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, and have no reason to doubt Crowley's account of the siege of Malta or the fall of Cyprus.

But personal memoirs are also fall into "nonfiction".  That is starting to seem much more dubious.  Many supposed memoirs (James Frey, Holocaust memoirs of being raised by wolves or fed by girls throwing apples across the fence, J T LeRoy, etc.) have recently been shown to be partly or largely fictional.  I don't think the truth-quality of memoirs has dropped.  I think the revelation of their falseness has been made easier.

One of my favorite blogs, prairiemary, recently mentioned something that has been out for a few years that, I will admit, did disturb me.  On Thursday she mentioned that the opening of Annie Dillard's memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where her tomcat comes through her window at night with bloody feet and leaves bloody pawprints on the bare skin of her chest didn't happen to her, but to a male student of hers, who gave her permission to use it as her own.

That book is wonderfully written, but I'd always doubted the "some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood".  My body?  Covered?  Some mornings?  I'd buy some blood on a nightgown once, and some dead animals (as Mary mentions) at other times.  The most common way memoirists distort events is to take the occasional or unique and make it habitual and characteristic of a period.

So:  did I "always doubt" it?  Or did it just occur to me, thinking back?  Here's the real problem of truth-in-memoir.  Even I can't quite be sure.

Now I know it didn't happen to Dillard.  And, most likely, it didn't happen to her student either, at least not exactly as described.  And how voluntary was the transfer of the story from student to teacher?

Whenever something like this comes out, there are those who say it doesn't matter, that they responded to the quality of the prose, or the psychological truth.  I can never figure out what these people are talking about.

I tell lies.  That's what my books are.  They are not true.  They didn't happen, and, in fact, could not happen.  I like to think that there is quality prose and psychological truth in what I write.

But it matters if something happened, or if it didn't.  The Turkish fleet really was repulsed at Malta, and really did conquer Cyprus.  Discovering that the dramatic defense of the fortress of St. Elmo at Malta was a fictional creation intended to boost the spirit of a beleaguered Europe would meaningfully change our perception of 16th century history.

Maybe that doesn't matter to some people.  It does to me.

Actors and Their Histories

I'm part of the aging cohort of subscribers to the Huntington Theater, one of our local theater companies.  Huntington productions are often worthy, and occasionally appalling--but not in a good way (newer playwrights sometimes give the impression of never having actually seen a play--but I'll have to deal with those experiences at a later time).  Last night was Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green, a self-congratulatory autobiographical play of literary education that managed to be both earnest and creepy.  It dates from the 1930s, when there were a lot of stages to fill, and a lot of plays written to fill them, and a lot of people who took them seriously.

It starred Kate Burton (Richard Burton's daughter), and her son.  Richard Burton was Welsh, the play is set in Wales, so Kate and her son spoke of their Welsh heritage, their visits to Wales, etc.

Last time I saw Kate Burton on the Huntington stage, she was in an excellent production of Hedda Gabler.  I don't recall her mentioning her Norwegian heritage then.

I would love to see an actor in one of these things not mention the heritage, the teacher, the experience in youth, or the neighbor that connects them to the play, but admit that they are actors, and that their personal background is completely irrelevant to their performance.  It is their skill and talent that makes them successful, and it is the author's words that connect them, and us, to the play.

But then what would the busy graduate students who probably write these things do with their time?  And what would I be doing while waiting for scene changes?

The Ultimate Critic

I'm currently reading Rodric Braithwaite's excellent Moscow 1941, an account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union with a focus of the life of the city itself.

Russia had been in the grips of the Terror since the start of the big purges in 1937:

In the four years before the war more than thirty-two thousand people died at the hands of the secret police in Moscow and the surrounding Region.

Two corpse disposal zones had been set up outside the city, one at Butovo, the other at Kommunarka.  Most of the elite, including artists and writers, were killed at the NKVD dacha at Kommunarka.  And it's here that I learned of a figure I had not heard of before, but about whom I intend to learn more, Vasili Blokhin:

Many of these executions were carried out by a squad under the command of Vasili Blokhin, a specialist in such matters.  Blokhin is said to have personally killed the theatre director Meyerhold, the writer Isaak Babel and Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

Blokhin also took a key role in the 1940 Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps, "wearing a leather apron and cap and long leather gloves":  he apparently carried out many of the killings of the Polish POWs personally, with a German Walther pistol he favored because it didn't jam when hot, at Mednoe, north of Moscow.

How is it that Blokhin is not better known?  The winnowing of writers in those years was brutal:  first silenced, then tortured and killed.  And if Blokhin did indeed carry out the killings personally, he was probably the last person to see them before they died.  Whether they saw him, I don't know.

On Rereading

In my early years as a reader (through high school, say), I reread constantly.  There were books I read over a dozen times--not on any regular schedule, like annually, but whenever I was in the mood.  Robert Heinlein was a particular favorite.  His rationality and structure served as a calming influence on my poorly organized mind.  For all I know, Door Into Summer served to send me into my career as an engineer.  I'll just have to forgive Heinlein for that.

But, in my older years, I had a greater goal orientation in my reading, as if I had to get through some chunk of the literature.  Rereading seemed like it was retarding my progress in comprehensive understanding.

I've recently found myself rereading more.  That's partially because I've been disappointed in a number of the books I've picked up, particularly novels. OK, particularly science fiction novels, my supposed field.  So much so that I was beginning to worry that I had lost my taste for reading.

So I decided to reread a book that I'd liked in the past.  Now, this can be dangerous, if you pick the wrong one.  My tastes have definitely changed since my adolescence, so Heinlein just wasn't going to cut it.

I pulled out an old paperback of Death of an Expert Witness, by P. D. James and took it on a weekend in Maine.  In the morning and in the evening, I was back in reader heaven.

I really don't remember what I've read that well, so rereading a book is pretty much like reading it for the first time--except that I'm sure I'll like what I'm reading. I won't find myself choking on the prose or getting irritated when a promising plot falls apart halfway through.

Dalgliesh and his team:  rationality and structure.  Architecture, the 39 Articles, a good claret.  My poor overheated brain is thanking me.  It's a relief to realize that I still like reading after all.

The Weight of Literature

Some hikers think it’s stupid to bring a book on a long hike. You’re there to connect with nature, they say. Once you’ve set up camp, you should observe, feel, and relate with the wonders around you.

I can’t argue with that. But I like to read, and reading in the sun by the side of a mountain lake is, for me, as good as it gets.

These hikers also point out, with more justice, that the damn things are heavy. Aren’t we all ultralight hikers now?

So the whole thing comes down to an unfamiliar literary calculus: reading value per ounce. Good books that are too heavy are out, as are less than good books at any weight.

But sometimes a heavier book can save your life. When caught by a sleet storm up near the divide in Jasper and forced to hole up for twenty four hours, I read Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and didn’t even notice the hours go by. At home, I’d had trouble with the book partway through (I had young kids at the time, and thus a reduced attention span—and the man could sure use a more assertive editor), but confined to a tent with nothing but sodden morrass outside, I followed the escape from New Guinea with total attention. A bit heavy and bulky, but that time it was the right choice.

On another Canadian Rockies hike I’d hauled Bed Gadd’s magnificent Handbook of the Canadian Rockies. Make no mistake, this is one of the best guide books to a wilderness area you’re going to find. But the thing is printed on coated paper and weighs over two pounds. That was just a symptom of greater overloading, and I was miserable that whole hike.

I read Stephen Jay Gould’s Panda’s Thumb in Dark Canyon, and Orwell’s essays in Bandelier.

I’m just back from the Sawtooths, where, after some internal debate (15 oz!) I brought Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo Rising, and didn’t regret it for a moment.

I presume the Kindle and its descendants will eliminate this entire critical metric—you can carry hundreds of books weighing only a few ounces. I won’t be able to resist for long.