Quiet Riot

San Francisco-- Americans were stunned by another act of senseless brutality this week when a San Francisco street performer went on a terrifying spree. Randy Heppelwhite, a San Francisco mime, was arrested by police yesterday after perpetrating what one onlooker called "one of the most hideously ambiguous performances I've ever seen." 

Union Square in the aftermath of the horror

"He jumped right out in front of a group of tourists, and without saying a word, he seemed to pull out a large caliber weapon of some sort," said Lars Chiswick, a manager at Banana Republic. "Some people were saying it was a revolver, some said a bazooka, but from the way he handled it, I'd say it was an automatic weapon, an Uzi or a Glock, maybe, the way he seemed to be spraying the whole square with hot lead. I saw people sitting down everywhere, walking away in panic. Very few people were tipping him, no large bills. One woman even hyperventilated. Then he tried to make his getaway on a unicycle, or it might have been a stegosaurus."

Breaking theme

As you're aware, I’m a novelist. Published. Traditionally. Three Sherlock Holmes adventures. But I’m not here to hawk them (not today). I just wanted to get that out of the way, because this post is about my fourth novel, which I’ve just finished, having finally discovered something crucial—my theme. I discovered it after adding one word to the text:

Pinocchio

(We’ll get back to that.)

You might think I’d have figured out theme before setting down word one. Or you might think the exact opposite, that theme is just a word cooked up by college professors to make reading a chore. Don’t hit me with them theme waves, man.

Don’t hit me with them negative waves.

Arthur Phillips on fiction

 

Arthur Phillips is one of my favorite writers working today. Perhaps his background as a jazz saxophonists or his record as a five-time Jeopardy champion informs his work, since he has six novels under his belt, and no two are alike in genre, style, or subject matter. He's an inspiration to any writer hoping to break out of the single-genre ghetto.

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?" 

Favorite works

The Egyptologist

Prague

Angelica

My Musical Miseducation

 

I missed the boat on music, and it still rankles. Let me say up front that, had things gone differently, I would not have become a musical prodigy, a rock star, or even a lounge singer with a baby blue tuxedo and a coke habit. There’s not a music molecule hiding anywhere in my DNA. But I might have at least been musically literate. Or what’s audio equivalent of literacy?

Grand Theft Voice

 Let’s try an experiment. Read the following quote by Morgan Freeman.

When you read it, did you hear Morgan Freeman’s distinctive baritone? Likely. There are memes all over the internet that ask you that very same question. It’s the natural outcome of having such a well-known voice and style.

But, as you may have guessed, that’s not actually a Morgan Freeman quote. It’s from Malcolm X. (And if you try to say it now in Malcolm X’s voice, you may find yourself actually borrowing Denzel Washington's voice in playing Malcolm X. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock: Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

So we could say I borrowed Morgan Freeman’s voice for this little thought experiment. Or nearer the mark would be to say I appropriated it. But to be truthful, I stole it. I stole Freeman’s likability, his air of authority, professionalism, and integrity. With Morgan Freeman, such antics are usually in the name of fun, but reassigning attribution of quotes to someone with more authority or a wider audience is endemic on the internet. Figures from Thomas Jefferson to Kurt Vonnegut have been misappropriated in this fashion. There have been a rash of pronouncements supposedly by the new pope that never passed his lips. I’m probably not telling you anything new here.

But now here’s an honest-god-quote from The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, a recent book by AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman:

Mutants

 

Maybe it's time we talked about mutants. No, not cool mutants with cool powers. I'm talking about the ever-growing minority who seem to have been born without the gene for empathy. Call them homo miserabilis. How long have they been among us? Are they here to stay? Does their mutation give them an advantage over homo sapiens that will eventually write our demise as a species? Is there some sort of treatment we can administer? Can we co-exist with them? I would have preferred mutations like eye-blasts and teleportation, and would have gotten along fine with our blue furry cousins. But evolution is an asshole.

Okay, maybe these narcissists—let’s call them what they are— aren’t mutants, but I became curious about the seeming decline of empathy, which a lot of people seem to have noticed and become alarmed by. Is all the evidence simply anecdotal? Turns out not. Here are two developments:

James Stephens on books

James Stephens, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce, largely forgotten today, wrote one of my three favorite books, The Crock of Gold -- a tale like no other I've ever read: by turns humorous, philosophical and poetic, whose premise is what happens when the leprechauns of Gort na Cloca Mora exact revenge for having their pot of gold stolen. 

So it seems incumbent upon me to share a couple of quotes from the man.

“He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. 

There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, "All heroines are charming to us.

--The Demi-Gods

Review: Dinner with King Tut

 

Dinner with King Tut is a strange sort of beast: let’s call it an anti-sphinx. Like the sphinx it’s composed of three dissimilar parts—not the face of a woman, the wings of a bird and the haunches of a lion, but science, fiction (but not science fiction) and DIY—where DIY involves the author learning how to knap stones, how to tattoo himself, to style hair like an ancient Roman matron, bake bread for Egyptian pyramid builders, and operate a trebuchet, among other skills once necessary for a precarious survival in different eras at different points on the globe. Also: tanning and trepanning.

And this sphinx not only poses riddles it tries its best to answer them, through the discipline of experimental archaeology. Which, if you (like me) have never heard of this field, you’re in for a series of fascinating discoveries, from a Turkish city where one’s relatives where buried beneath one’s bed to the unusual height of Chinese eunuchs.

Ozempic and the Seven Deady Sins

 This will not be an ad for Ozempic. Nor will it be a jeremiad against the drug. My cardiologist told me a story about GLP-1 and the gila monster. (Yes at a certain age, you suddenly have a "my cardiologist.” Mine is a grandfatherly story-spinner.) Three to four extensive meals in spring are claimed to supply a gila monster with enough energy for a whole season. Scientists wondered why, which is what scientists do. What they also do is investigate.

.What they found was a hormone in the venom of that gila monster that stimulates the production of insulin—similar to a hormone naturally produced by humans, with the jaw-breaking name of glucagon-like peptide-1, which is sensibly abbreviated to GLP-1, (and I’ll leave to you to wonder whether there’s such a thing as GLP-2 or GLP-3). At any rate, other scientists were able to synthesize this hormone and patent it, and then marketers were able to come up with ten thousand names for this wonder drug. I personally am prescribed with Monjauro, which I’m constantly confusing with a local Italian restaurant named Monjuni’s.

Conversation with a comic strip

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

--Michelangelo Buonarroti

I came across this comic strip the other night in my Memories feed on Facebook. It was originally posted by a friend nine years ago. I obviously didn't pay it much attention (and attention is today's coin of the realm), because I gave it a like, but didn't bother to comment.

Consider this reparation. This time I pulled up short and gave the strip careful consideration. What was different? You never step into the same stream twice and all that jazz. I'm late to the party (as usual) on this strip, which is from 2013, and I'm way late on its creator, who's been kicking it at the inkstand since 2001.

I've seen numerous strips by the same cartoonist, the monochromatic stick figures holding a four-panel conversations, more often than not with no attribution, thrown upon the world like orphans at the church door. His name is Tom Gauld. I googled him. He's a Scottish cartoonist, illustrator, and writer of graphic novels. (Is writer the right word? Composer? Creator? Confabulator?) If Schulz's preoccupation was preternaturally adult kids and Gary Larsen's was barnyard animals, Gauld's seems to be writers and books, which seems fitting in this age of meta (and of Meta).

But which is right, Gauld or Michelangelo? Is writing a process of decision, or discovery?

Whole Lotta Love

I remember particularly the first time I heard Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.

It must have been 8th grade--1970. I was with my best friend and his older brother, and his brother's friend, the cool kid who had taught us how to tie-dye tee shirts. (We would later learn how to stress jeans by tying bricks to them and dragging them behind a car;  since none of us had a car at the time, that was more of an aspirational thing.) 

This post is available as audio here on Substack.

The older brother's twin had bowed out. He was a contrarian, into country music at a time and an age when no one was into country music. Although, come to think of it, that whole family had a weakness for country music star Faron Young. Whether that was because he hailed from our hometown or because he was the spokesman for BC headache powders remains to this day a mystery. 

Lawsuits in Munchkinland

Harburg KS-

A new class-action suit filed on behalf of the residents of a small Midwestern town devastated by a killer tornado two years ago raises new questions of influence and accountability for mass media. The suit, filed by citizens of Harburg, Kansas pits the town against MGM Studios, makers of the 1939 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

(The audio version of this post is available here on Youtube.)

In Harm's Way

The plaintiffs claim that MGM "did lull residents into a false sense of security when the tornado was reported, and even encouraged them to remain in harm's way in anticipation of the thrill ride of their lives."

"We always knew the house would pitch if it got hit by a twister, and probably a few of the hinges would unhitch," said Ebenezer Gale, whose home was destroyed by the storm, "but we'd seen the 'Wizard of Oz' dozens of times over the years, so we figured we'd just fetch up on a rainbow and put down somewheres in Munchkin Land. You can't find a vacation that cheap on Priceline.com.”

"Sure we got a storm cellar," said Emily Gale, "Everybody's got a storm cellar, you old fool. But who wants to be cooped up there when you could be visiting the Emerald City gettin' one of them makeovers, and maybe meeting Glinda the Good Witch?" Mrs. Gale had both legs broken by flying debris, and is confined to a wheelchair at this time. “We also lost a cow and several chickens in the storm. Just disappeared. We figure the Munchkins have got ‘em. We want ‘em back. If that wizard wants to play hardball, the president has promised to serve ‘em with tariffs.We believe in only licking American lollipops, anyway.”

In defense of adverbs

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

I'm not much on wrangling over writerly advice. It often seems a pointless exercise. So why get down into the trenches over adverbs here? First because the eight parts of speech are my favorite parts of speech. Second, because I'd like to make a larger point about the word "never" when it comes to doling out advice. A common sense argument, if you will, from someone who has never considered common sense a common attribute among people.

"I seem to be a verb" is Buckminster Fuller's famous declaration. I'll go him one better. I seem to be an adverb. Which is to say, a jack of all trades. For I am not merely an action, a process, I’m a constantly recalibrating and refining process, and this is the definition of a well-used adverb. Yes, "I go through life hurriedly" can be replaced by "I rush through life", but can be further refined as "I rush through life precipitously" or even ""I rush through life precipitously whole heartedly." With nuance come adverbs.

Adverbs are not just the despised -ly words. Here's an adverb for you: here. And there. And everywhere--all adverbs. Of the five journalistic questions, when, what, where, why, and how, adverbs answer four. As a matter of fact, those four are adverbs.There are adverbs of manner, of place, time, degree, frequency, conjunctive, interrogative, and relative adverbs. There are even focusing adverbs. What the hell tis his Pandora's box of adverbs? 

Let's have a quick look.

Review: Falls to Pieces

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

When we think of Hawaii we're apt to picture a lush landscape of surfer-size waves, with green palms shading flower-bedecked hula dancers. That's not the setting of Falls to Pieces, where a savage jungle landscape is at war with developers who would pave paradise and put up a parking lot. It's a foe to be respected by Kati Dawes and her daughter Zoe, who have gone off grid and incognito on the island of Maui, hoping to escape their past. But the past catches up, with devastating results. Author Douglas Corleone spells it out at one point: Paradise is safe only in designated places.

When the story opens, two murders have already occurred, driving the plot forward with the fury of Fates. Kati has the unfortunate habit or luck of putting her welfare in the hands of  treacherous men, so when the kidnapping which is  the axle of this novel takes place, suspects are thick on the ground. Beware: no one in this novel. and I mean absolutely no one, is to be trusted. And Kati's memory is not what it was before she sampled the pharmacopeia from Ativan to Zoloft.

Christmas v. Easter

(This post is available in audio format  here on Youtube.) "Imagine this. It's Christmas Eve and you have to wrap all your own presents. And that's supposed to be a lot of fun. Even though your presents are all underwear and socks. You know that, because you're the person wrapping them. And on Christmas morning, your presents aren't under the tree. You have to go outside and root around in the bushes to find them before the neighbor kids snatch them up.

And when you tear off the wrapping paper, all you've got is underwear and itchy socks.

That's Easter. Am I wrong?

Also, imagine instead of Christmas parties and Advent calendars  and Christmas carols, you have to give up everything you like and eat a ton of fishsticks all through Advent. That's Easter.

Easter: the one day we celebrate man-made ecological disaster by hiding hard-boiled eggs around the neighborhood and then forgetting where, so they're like little IEDs.

Review: The Wildes

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.) The Wildes seems at first blush to promise a very intimate tale of a very public man, something along the lines of Louis Bayard's earlier novel Courting Mr. Lincoln. until we realize at what point we've been dropped into this tale. The story begins just before what most people would consider The End of Oscar Wilde: not his death, but his death-in-life, the accusations, the trial for slander, and the consequences. This story could be called the aftermath of Oscar. Oscar, in life always at center stage, must give up the spotlight on this occasion. This time, the walk-ons speak.

The story begins with an idyll, a brief time snatched from time in an Edenic inglenook of Norfolk where the Wildes, along with sundry supporting characters, have decamped, ostensibly to give Oscar the peace necessary to finish his latest play, although other motives are at play. And the novel keeps returning to that time, those events, that last weekend in particular, trying to make sense of it all, of how the family was cast out of Eden forever, when they might have stayed.

Jules Feiffer on writing

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

"Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw."

--Jules Feiffer 

Jules left us in January. Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter. Illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. Winner of the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Review: The Shotgun Approach

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

You've got to keep an eye on William Martell. He's a master of misdirection. He lays out the evidence fairly but sneakily in each of his novelettes (novellas? long short stories?).

The Shotgun Approach concerns a formerly hit music duo with more than a passing resemblance to Hall and Oates, except the frontman has had his blonde head blown off with a shotgun and his partner is the prime suspect, along with the victim's ex-wife and his former producer, who all, by odd coincidence, are checked into the same VIP floor of the same luxury hotel on the night of the murder.

Hosting the proceedings are a burnt-out San Francisco police detective and her latest partner, who's been assigned the unenviable task of making sure she doesn't kill anyone. No one has had any luck in that department so far.

Holmes the bohemian

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

Bohemia, bordered on the North by hope, work, and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital.”  --Henry Murger,   La Vie de Bohème    We often think of Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of the scientific mind, "a calculating machine," as Watson calls him. But Watson also acknowledges another side to Holmes: the Bohemian. Here's an excerpt from, aptly enough, A Scandal in Bohemia:

"...while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

Another contribution from The Engineer's Thumb:

"I continually visited him, and occasionally even persuaded him to forego his Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us." 

But was Holmes truly Bohemian?  Or is Watson tossing off the word carelessly, describing Holmes's aversion to society and nothing more? What does the term even mean, beyond its connotation of an anti-social bent? Let's dig in.

Plot and subplot plotted

The Veneerings Dinner, by Sol Eytinge

“Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us'!”

--Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I'm now going to throw a passel of two-dollar words at you just to work toward an idea that's rather simple. Forgive me, that's the way my mind works, like a popcorn machine-- when it works at all. It's usually because I'm trying to convince myself of what I'm saying. I'm rarely preaching to the choir even when I'm talking to myself.

We're going to start with Cartesian coordinates, the x and y axes. We're going to label the x axis, the horizontal, plot. We'll call the y axis, the vertical, subplot. Or we could just as easily designate them as melody and harmony. Or to borrow the language of semiotics, syntagm and paradigm, which should give us a little more room to work in. What are those rooms?

Review: The Versailles Formula

The Versailles Formula starts with an eerie, haunting image: a ghost patters down a long, dark hallway night after night, past a suit of armor, trying in vain to seize its prize, the portrait of an angel--but always vanishing before he wins his goal. Genevieve Sturbridge nee Planche is back. And solving this mystery will only lead to more mysteries, a trail of bodies, and desperate danger.

Genevieve, of course, is the Huguenot heroine with French heritage and British loyalties, with one foot in the art world and the other mired in espionage. In this third book in the series she's teamed with an army captain almost as stubborn and resourceful as she is. Sparks fly.

(An audio version od this post is available here on Youtube.)

First Book Redux

 I've been behind-hand in reminding you about my favorite cause, First Book. With the administration threatening to shut down the department of Eduction, First Book's mission becomes even more vital. And what's the mission?

To put books into the hands of kids who can't afford them.

Review: My Name Is Emilia del Valle

 

I was afraid the book had gotten away from her. It had gotten away from me, and I thought irretrievably. It begins slowly like one of those austere Chilean warships she writes about, becomes unwieldy, and when the engine explodes, I was sure we were going to the bottom. It sailed into port like a hand in a silk glove. But let me try to be a little more prosaic. 

The titular Emilia del Valle grows up in San Fransisco during the 1890s, the last gasp of the gold rush. Her mother, an Irish girl, was about to take her vows as a nun when she was seduced by a Chilean aristocrat who abandoned her and her child. She finds shelter and eventual domestic bliss with a  greathearted schoolteacher, but she always harbors a desire for revenge upon her seducer. And she tries to transfer that vengeful desire to her daughter.

Who will play the Sherlocks?

 

Sherlock Holmes devotees all have an opinion on one crucial question: Who played the best Sherlock? From William Gillette to Benedict Cumberbatch, they will wrangle over every actor who was ever measured for a deerstalker cap. Writers of Sherlock Holmes pastiches have a slightly different question, however:

Who would play my Sherlock best?

 

Or in my case, my Sherlocks. (Well,  it'sConan Doyle's Sherlock, of course, but my transliterations thereof.) And I use the plural because I have written three Sherlock books which portray the Great Detective at three very different ages--36, 58, and 70. I suppose if Netflix were doing a miniseries, they'd use one actor and plenty of make-up and CGI. But if they were three separate movies, what then? 

Tom Robbins on writing

 

Tom Robbins, best known as the author of eight remarkable, subversive novels, died this month at the age of 92. Here's Robbins laying down the rules of writing:

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

--Tom Robbins

May he rest in rebelliousness, riotousness, and redemption.

Memory is a dangerous neighborhood

 

An odd thing happened recently. I was thinking of an old friend who's in the hospital. A song came to mind: the Doobie Brothers' For Someone Special. And then I thought of the first jukebox I first  heard the song on (pointed out to me by a friend as the B side of Takin' It to the Streets).

It was the jukebox in the first bar I worked at, over forty years ago in New Orleans, a college bar located in the armpit of Tulane University called The Boot. I could picture that jukebox, its location just inside the entrance to the bar, like a squat sentinel. Then something scary happened.

Inventing astrology

 

The origins of astrology are cloudy. The sky has been a problem for man ever since the dawn of time, or possibly later that same week. What is the sky? asked primitive man. How far up does it go? What holds it up? How often should it be mowed? Is my neighbor Og’s sky bluer than mine? Does it cross the line into my sky?

Primitive man was extremely territorial.

Early civilizations avoided looking at the sky, afraid that it might get angry and fall on them. Assyrian nobles favored their much taller Hittite slaves as bodyguards, reasoning that if the sky fell, they’d take the brunt of the impact. The ancient Babylonians did attempt an ambitious project to build a tower all the way to the sky. Ultimately, the project failed, however, mainly due to the use of Mafia-connected contractors for construction work.

The Phoenicians first noticed that there were objects suspended in the firmament. This made them an extremely nervous people. They would dart back and forth under the trees, muttering the words “firmament, firmament” to each other, hoping to avoid any falling celestial objects. They invented boats so they could get out from under the sky at short notice. Eventually they sailed their boats so far that they sailed right off the edge of the planet, and were a happier people as a result.

Cloudology

It was the Greeks who gave us the science of astrology. The Greeks gave the world reason and logic. So far they’ve refused to take them back. Credit for the invention of astrology goes to Optometrus of Thebes, although the role of Estremides the Athenian cannot be discounted. Both men were philosophers, but Optometrus also had a thriving business in time-share goats. The two philosophers were walking together one day in the groves of Academe, hoping to catch a glimpse of Academe’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Minerva the Winsome. They stopped for a moment to gaze at the clouds lazing across the sky.