James K. Bashkin's Page

A Year in Van Nuys, Depth Takes a Holiday and If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now, all by Sandra Tsing Loh (read years ago and greatly enjoyed- discussed recently with friends). Loh is a multi-instrumentalist who has performed on piano (see LA freeway performance art), vocals (hear her commentary on public radio shows, including Marketplace: The Loh-Down) and typewriter.*

Murder Duet: A Musical Case by Batya Gur (thinking about, read and enjoyed years ago, want to write about it but can't review this one without going through it again- a fine, complex mystery).

A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne (read recently and enjoyed, will review, suburbia gets the creeps, and maybe more!)

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (read recently, a richly developed novel of mystery, murder and families, not necessarily in that order, review on its way).

The Innocent and Death of an Englishman, by the late Magdalen Nabb, read recently. These are wonderful mysteries, though The Innocent is a tragic tale, if tempered by the joyously deep understanding and love of his people, and the quirky pragmatism, of the Florentine Marshall Guarnaccia. This has been much in my mind because a note from Cara Black really personalized the loss of this wonderful author, as did the fact that my late father and mother met in Florence.

Chronicles by Bob Dylan. I'm savoring this one- reading it remarkably slowly. I just don't want it to end. I almost never read slowly, though sometimes I read over decades. A few of Lawrence Durrell's books fit in that category, for example, but in those cases the writing reminds me of traveling through Norway: each page is so beautifully written, each sentence is such a gem, that wherever you are, there is no great hurry to go anywhere else. I've been discussing (with friends again) the Dylan-related book Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, by David Hajdu, which I thoroughly enjoyed (in spite of the bad review by Greil Marcus, whose own books I also enjoy, but I felt this review of his was done poorly). Somehow I can't get over the fact that my wife was growing up in Chelsea Massachusetts and going to the beach right when and where Bob and Joan where picnicking (well, we haven't established actual simultaneity, but the year was the same).

The Chekhov short stories and literary crit. on Wilkie Collins mentioned in previous posts: both still in progress, both well worth it.

My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism's Hidden Hero (MSQFM) by Malcolm Bradbury. I have the oddest feeling that I somehow incorporated the entire text of this book into my memory of Dr. Criminale, also by Bradbury, so that my review of Criminale is really a review of a composite of the two books. This will require some research (or helpful feedback!!??). MSQFM is the postmodern novel that really makes an art of the wild goose chase.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the book that helped spawn the environmental movement. I've been thinking about this because of the smear campaign being perpetrated against the memory of Rachel Carson by anti-environmentalists.

No musicology.

Amazingly, I can locate every single book mentioned on this page. In my house. Now.

I'll track down and add links and pictures later. Comments are welcome!

*Sandra is the sister of a very dear friend.

Added late: almost forgot that I just started The Vice-Consul by Marguerite Duras.

Added later: I've frequently found myself discussing The Emperor of Ocean Park (TEoOP) by Stephen L. Carter (a first novel for the acclaimed legal scholar). TEoOP is one of my favorite books of recent years because, while an excellent (if not absolutely perfect) mystery, it has also set me thinking a lot about race relations, white liberals (that would be me), African Americans and the Black church(es). Carter's protagonist makes some intriguing remarks on the subject, remarks that I suspect are rooted in truth. More to come.


© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags: Contemporary Fiction, The Emperor of Ocean Park, Batya Gur, Bob Dylan, cara black, DDT, david hajdu, greil marcus, marguerite duras, malcolm bradbury, Norway, wilkie collins, Stephen L. Carter, Silent Spring, environmentalism, environment, Chekhov, Sandra Tsing Loh, rachel carson, suzanne berne, magdalen nabb, kate atkinson, lawrence durrell
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Click on the title to find your way to video of famous writers speaking on the color green and the health of our planet- a link that I found via the literary blog MetaxuCafe.

Also, see (or perhaps read) why Willie Nelson might be right, but most of the politicians you know are wrong. This discussion is, of course, regarding biofuels, including biodiesel: the things that are raising your food prices and helping to destroy our rain forests (a process that really didn't need any more help, thank you very much).

What has happened to fiction here? Hard to say. I've been writing on science for the general public in the past few days. I haven't actually read any fiction for perhaps three days, but I have been reading about fiction.

This started out because I had been thinking about Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, mainly with regard to some discussions of mystery stories and genre fiction over on Crimespace. In fact, I've actually been reading some literary criticism on the subject. It may reveal some of the nature of my relationship with books to admit that I only had to go to my own bookshelf to find the appropriate volume, unread, lying in wait. I know, I know, it is a slippery slope. The next thing you know, I'll be reading musicology if I'm not careful.

Anyway, The Moonstone is a heck of a mystery story. It is so well-known that all I'll say about it is the following: you should read it if you like a great mystery. The Woman in White wasn't quite as memorable for me, but it still was an excellent story (perhaps defining the Gothic novel). The thing is, when I read them, I had no idea about the subtexts on Victorian society that can be found in these books. Presumably, these discoveries would not be as surprising to the author.

I read these books many decades ago and carried their memory along with me, if with decreasing clarity over the years. However, there is a collection of essays on Collins that turns out to make fascinating reading, and has brought the books to life with much new perspective. The essays address his novels, his friendship and ventures with Dickens, his subtle (i.e. it went over my head) association of the Indian Subcontinent with the pure and good in The Moonstone, and the less subtle (i.e. I got this one the first time around) association of (some) Victorian Christians with evil. The book is The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (TCCTWC), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor (no relation to Jason, I gather). Since you know that I hardly ever write about a book I don't like, it will be no surprise that I recommend TCCTWC. However, I have taken a hyper-postmodern approach to reading the book: my reading has been nonlinear and markedly non-sequential. I've just been opening to random pages and enjoying whatever I find, so I've read perhaps 25% of the text. But I'm getting there. You might want to get there, too.

I leave you with the following question(s): is it plausible that Wilkie Collins fit so much intricate social commentary into his books, or did the critics put it there for him? And, if so, how many mystery writers of today are taking on an entire society, or a significant bite of one, as a subtle subtext for their thriller's?

A little subtlety would be nice in a literary genre where it sometimes seems that every corporation is evil, every politician is a crook, every mild-mannered accountant, housewife or lawyer can become a killing machine at will, and every crook is a renaissance man (or woman). I'm referring, of course, to some of the books I didn't like and have therefore not reviewed (though I did slip up and mention one or two by name, here and there over the past month- see if you can find them).

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:mystery, wilkie collins, the moonstone, the woman in white, crimespace, fiction, literary criticism, the Cambridge companion to wilkie collins, biofuel, jane goodall, bioenergy, corn, ethanol, rain forest, environment, alternative fuels
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I have started a new site to separate my writing on Science & Society and Green Chemistry from my fiction site. That should make things less confusing.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:rules of green chemistry, pollution prevention, science, science and society, chemistry, green chemistry, technology, environment
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When I started writing on September 1, 2007, I had trouble with certain links. They appear in my composition and HTML windows in blogger but are otherwise invisible. I have addressed this for Sept. 1 by adding a slideshow of recommended books, music, and DVD's (at the bottom of the right-hand column).

Technorati Tags:nick hornby, believer, the wire, taj mahal, edgar allan poe, high fidelity, fever pitch
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© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:victorian, flatland. mathematics, geometry, flatterland, does god play dice?, nature's numbers, edwin abbott, ian stewart, n-dimensional, 4th dimension, fairy tale, the annotated flatland, hampstead, hampstead heath
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The Unquiet Night by Australian author Patricia Carlon (SOHO Press) was originally published in 1965 according to my much more recent Soho first edition. The author is Australian, born nearly the same year as my Australian mother. Enough about me. The point is that the suspense in this murder mystery/thriller is breathtaking- hold onto your chair. In this novel, we do not find ourselves in the big cities so synonymous with a large fraction of crime fiction. Instead, we translocate to a small town in Australia, and the habits and familiar assumptions of small-town life play a big role in nearly all aspects of the story.

The tension of the novel starts out being notable by its absence: even the first words "He didn't mean to kill her" seem to position a killer as just a simple-minded and clumsy young man guilty of manslaughter. However, this is an illusion, in part because the viciousness that the young man's later exhibits lets us see through the facade of his manner to identify him as a true sociopath. Tension accelerates rapidly in the latter half of the book, reaching a finish that should bring your heart to 140 drumbeats per minute or higher.

At the start, a woman named Rachel and her 9-year old niece Ann go out for a picnic that is cut short by rain, and the aunt happens to see, in passing, a young man of no particular note. However, the pitch changes to a note of terror when eventually Rachel realizes that the young man is after her. Unfortunately for our delightful aunt and niece, Martin Deeford, known as "Mart", is quite clever in tracking them down, though he is hindered by some elderly residents who aren't fools. This wise behavior by the neighbors is aided and abetted by sensible family protectiveness, even though aunt Rachel and Ann's parents have no idea what they are protecting against. Something just doesn't seem right about the occasional phone call.

I'm not sure that the fractured cleverness that Mart displays, at least in mid-story, matches the rest of his somewhat stunted persona, though this is a sly character who has always manipulated and tended toward violence. Mart is certainly one smug and cruel young man who is too clever for anyone's good, including his own.

Along the way, any parent will shudder at the manipulations (of school officials, friends, and neighbors) that allow Mart to insinuate himself inside the defenses of the family circle. We can sing the praises of nosy neighbors who care, and who recognize improper behavior when they see it. Small town courtesy counteracts that suspicion in some cases, however, and we wonder if courtesy and busy family life will conspire to doom 9-year old Ann and her aunt Rachel. These ironies are not the greatest ones the story has to offer, but the rest are best discovered by the reader.

Complicating the storyline of The Unquiet Night is the very believable, modern, independent and capable aunt herself, who remains in a noncommittal relationship that provides the space she craves, space that could ultimately lead to her death. The build-up and let-down of false hopes in Rachel's final struggles batter the reader's psyche (let alone Rachel's), so that we reach a point where, for Aunt Rachel, drifting off into that sweet oblivion of death may be our only release.

In the end, this book has a lot to say about fear. Fear of discovery leads Martin from what he thinks of as an accidental death into a web of violence where he plots several murders and tries to save himself from discovery. Normal fear of modern life does its best to keep Ann and Rachel alive. Our fear of what might happen keeps us glued to the page.

With Mart's fear increasing at each step, along with his anger at the intended victims, Mart circles his fate, moving closer with each new version of his plan. All the while, Mart tries to bend that fate to his own end, the end of Ann and Rachel. We hope fervently, and some may begin to pray, that in spite of his planning, Martin never thinks far enough ahead to see the endgame.

Conclusion? This particular Australian crime fiction travels as well the best Shiraz and arrives at its destination with just moments to spare. No superhuman beasts or heroes were required to bring this story to life; great words and small town life did the job.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:patricia carlon, the unquiet night, australia, murder, suspense, thriller, crime fiction, international crime fiction
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To The Hermitage (TTH) by Malcolm Bradbury is a most rewarding, if occasionally challenging, book. It contains two parallel stories. One story describes the great French philosopher and intellectual Denis Diderot, contemporary of Voltaire's and author/editor of the monumental Encyclopedia, finally making the perilous journey in 1773 from Paris to St. Petersburg. With this trip, he is fulfilling his long-avoided promise to visit Catherine the Great, who had purchased his vast library for her collection. The other story is a modern academic/artistic pilgrimage, The Diderot Project, following partly in the philosopher's footsteps to St. Petersburg on the eve of violent social change in Russia (in 1993).

One odd thing is that I read Katherine Neville's The Eight while reading TTH, and they had many of the same characters, in addition to having the same sort of temporally-split story line featuring contemporary and 18th century settings. The Eight is a thriller that mixes old myths, chess and modern intrigue. It pre-dates The Da Vinci Code by many years (published in 1988) and is quite well written, only losing some taughtness of storyline towards the end. What TTH and The Eight have in common is a large number of real historical characters, and reading them nearly simultaneously helped me recall or learn some history through immersion in Europe before (1773) and during (1789) the French Revolution.

What does one feel on first looking into a 500 page novel about a philosopher and some academics and sundry artistic types? I could admit to a little trepidation, even being a huge fan of Bradbury's. Luckily, the author put me at ease immediately, after a brief introduction, with an uproariously hilarious Chapter One. It begins with the remarkable shell game played on our modern narrator, an English novelist, by a delightful Swedish bank teller, who reduces a decent amount of English money to a tiny number of American dollars by a process of charging tax at every possible opportunity (and some that seem impossible). The bank converts everything to Swedish kronor both coming and going . All of this is done while denying the validity of credit cards (in 1993!) and offering the most cheerful, beautiful, blond, blue-eyed smiling face. The IRS might want to note the deadly tactics.

A series of initially confusing chapters take place THEN, with the great philosopher, but these are sandwiched in between each chapter taking place NOW, where we are treated to the most accessible and frequently funny assemblage of Diderot Project members and their subsequent departure on a ship to St. Petersburg. The events leading up to departure include a continual comedy of manners and errors, starting with

• A futile search of Stockholm for René Descartes’ tomb
• • It turns out that Descartes died in Stockholm, but the journey that his remains took outdoes even the Australian Philosophers' Song for Groucho Marxian hilarity (see the link for lyrics or YouTube for audio/video). Trying to trace the remains of M. Descartes could reduce a man to tears.
• An extraordinarily chilly reception by our English narrator's Swedish hosts, the married couple Bo and Alma Luneberg (Bo is on the committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it is part of his job to give false hope to writers everywhere, as sincerely as possible).
  
• • Alma essentially says, "we would have been happy to bring you to our home for dinner instead of to this crummy little restaurant, but in Sweden, we keep our homes for our real friends." Such warmth!
    
• The absolute inability of the poor narrator to convince his hosts that, as much as he likes it, he does not want to eat herring yet again on his first day in Sweden.

Then, while we begin to develop a feel for Diderot himself and for the form his story of 1773 will take, we meet gorgeous opera singer Birgitta Lindhorst, Swedish diplomat Anders Manders, skilled cabinetmaker Sven Sonnenburg, hip American professor Jack-Paul Verso (author of The Feminists' Wittgenstein) and other project members. In spite of the battle beginning between Boris Yeltsin and hard-line Russian communists, the group leaves port to sail up the Baltic and into Russia, accompanied by a dazzling assortment of chambermaids, bartenders, exotic dancers, and waitresses, all seemingly named Tatyana.

It turns out that the 18th century was a dangerous time for philosophers: a time when Emperors and Empresses needed the great men as advisers in court, but given the nature of the advice and nature of the men, a time when the philosophers often wound up in prison.

So it is with some justified fear that Diderot allows himself to be delivered, through a painful journey, to the court of Catherine. He proceeds to write a treatise on how to improve Russia, which he delivers once a week in written and spoken form to the Tzarina (I paraphrase):

• "What, you want me to free the Serfs? Are you mad? They would rise up against me!"
• "But no, Your Most Imperial Majesty, they would not, because of the extreme gratitude they would owe you. They would be your loyal servants."
• "They are my loyal servants now, with no option to be otherwise. I think it is better. Let us discuss something else- reform of my police force, perhaps."

So we find in Diderot quite an American sense of Democracy, one might say.

As the modern Diderot Project members travel to and around St. Petersburg, its members become rather dispersed, and the concept of The Project seems to crumble due to the combined and contradictory pressures of, for example, the charming Tatyana from Puskin and the thrilling examination of the remains of Diderot's library. The discovery of volumes signed by Diderot, with extensive notes in the margins, and similar volumes with Voltaire's imprint, is, to our novelist, like discovering the lost library of Alexandria. Jack-Paul Verso's discoveries tend more towards Pushkin, and I don't mean the author!

I find that in trying to capture the book I can only come up with a pale imitation of the original, so, enough with the synopsis! Suffice it to say that there are long discussions, practical, theoretical, and always with a hint of danger, that occupy Diderot and his patron, and Denis is quite happy to depart home for France as long as he doesn't have to worry about being executed for treason when he arrives. He achieves his goal eventually.

At the same time, the apparently disintegrated Diderot Project really ends up providing each member with what (or whom) he or she sought. Plans are already being drawn up for a second Project, if only, Alma reminds everyone, they would write their papers on Diderot before arriving, next time.

So what is the bottom line? This book might not be for everyone, but if you have a love of history, or philosophy, or writing, or language, and a desire to learn a bit about vastly disparate European cultures while laughing quite a lot through the nervous times of the 1770's and 1990's, pick it up right away.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:descartes, catherine the great, denis diderot, st. petersburg, malcolm bradbury, to the hermitage, Voltaire, philosophy, the eight, katherine neville, russia, sweden, fiction
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Crime fiction is such a pleasure, the psychology of this sometimes troubles me (but I know I can quit whenever I want to).

Technorati Tags:gerald du maurier, henry james, david lodge, anton chekhov, daphne du maurier, j. m. barrie, peter pan, svengali, trilby, the birds, bestseller, rebecca, don't look now
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I recommend that you explore digitalemunction, a site for the original writing, thoughts and photographs of Robert P. Baird of Chicago. A piece on the econometrics of hate crime particularly struck me as insightful, but I have barely scratched the surface.

If you like books, words, language and culture, you will enjoy looking at the site Life in Translation, which deals with translating Spanish into English and refers to many related sites, including one that details mistranslation in movies (films).

Both of these sites are now on my blogroll.

Speaking of mistranslation, I've occasionally been responding in languages other than English, including Spanish, German, and French, both here and on other sites (including detectives beyond borders and crimespace). These efforts have pretty weak outside of Spanish and the occasional word, say, of Swedish or some form of the Norwegian language that I have picked up "along the avenue" (I never asked for an explanation of the different forms of Norwegian while I was there, though I did hear some discussion of Bokmål and Nynorsk/New Norsk one dark, cold winter night in about 1980 while warming by the fire after an exhausting day of cross country skiing). Thanks for your patience with my foreign language efforts.

I have been cleaning up my site to try to make up for my lack of knowledge when I started the blog. Expert status remains elusive, but here we go: some previously invisible links are now visible (like links to two of Gary Disher's books that I really enjoyed). In addition to these technical issues, some comments have been clarified or amplified. These include the mention of Tourette Syndrome, as part of my very brief remarks on the unusual nature of Jonathan Lethem's terrific novel Motherless Brooklyn. These edits, including the continual cleanup of typographical errors, are more obvious on the RSS feed than on the native blog itself. I guess many of you know why.

I think should disclose Cara Black is now a friend due to a very kind and generous email exchange. This will not slow down my commentary on her wonderful detective stories set in Paris, or on any other of Soho Press/Soho Crime's many first-rate volumes.

The list of Labels on the right hand side of the page may be annoyingly long, but it will help you find anything on the site. As a possible aid to the blogosphere, technorati tags are being inserted throughout, rather exhaustively. I'm not how smart the technorati search engine is. If you have any thought on these matters, I'd be happy to hear them.

I have finished Jonathan Lethem's book You Don't Love Me Yet, but I'm not yet sure what to say about it. I won't rush it. So here instead is something I wrote the other day in response to Annalee Blysse asking about people's experiences with small planes (the date is accurate +/- one year):

"I took my first flight in a small plane in 1975. The pilot was a friend from high school and we were college freshmen at the time. I never really thought about it for a second, until right after take-off. Then I became distinctly aware of the fact that I was in a tin can, and not a heavy duty one, bouncing all over the place. So, I had a quick decision to make: do I panic because my buddy is taking me to my death in a flimsy piece of junk that has just launched into the sky, or do I sit back and enjoy the ride? Luckily, I was able to accomplish the latter. Panic didn't seem like a helpful or practical solution to anything. Later, we flew into Mexico for a couple of trips and slept under the wings- just imagine customs & immigration checks on a couple of kids with a plane! Just imagine not being able to raise the tower (in Spanish or English) at Guaymas, and then having a 727 pull in right behind us and almost blow us away (literally). Ah, those were the days."

Annalee recommends http://www.flork.com/ (Flork: Meet new people Webwide) for book promotion. Comments are most appreciated, as always.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:Gary Disher, life in translation, book translation, foreign languages, Spanish, German, Swedish, languages of Norway, Robert P. Baird, Jonathan Lethem, you don't love me yet, blogosphere, technorati tags, motherless brooklyn, tourette syndrome, Cara Black, Norwegian languages, small airplanes, Flork, Mexico, French, soho press, crimespace, detectives without borders, soho crime, detective, crime fiction
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Sorry to those of you who are not finding as many good links on my site as you might like. The Amazon context links have been coming and going; I don't get it, but I haven't done my homework either, so I'm not pointing fingers elsewhere. Powell's Bookstore has a system that is reliable, but take me a while to generate everything (one link at a time).

Your patience and continued feedback is appreciated. I have edited and updated a few old posts tonight and am working on a new story, but it isn't ready. The process begins to remind me of the Grateful Dead song Friend of the Devil: "If I get (done) before daylight, I just might get some sleep ... tonight". However, I'm too old, so it will have to wait. Jim

Well, I wrote it after all, but the "new" post shows up below.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

Technorati Tags:friend of the devil, grateful dead, powell's bookstore
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