Throwback

Nostalgia afflicts all of us occasionally. Sometimes we even feel it for an era we never experienced. I’m a fan of ‘40s noir, for example, and “miss” aspects of that decade in America (not the reprehensible aspects, of course) even though it was before I was born. Woody Allen explored the same idea in Midnight in Paris in which a 21^st century young man is transported to the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Gertrude Stein. The feeling has more force, however, with regard to events we have experienced. I suffered (which is to say enjoyed) three nostalgia attacks of the latter kind this month. I recommend all three to varying degrees. For readers much younger than I, the three sources perhaps still can trigger nostalgia in the former way.

**** ****

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

Bad Times at the El Royale, directed by Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods), is set (mostly) in 1969. Since Goddard was born in 1975, his nostalgia for the ‘60s has the one-step-removed nature of mine for the ‘40s. Nonetheless, he not only gets small details right, he more importantly gets the feel right, which most modern takes on the decade do not.

The El Royale Hotel/Motel straddles the California/Nevada border. In the 1950s it had been kitschy but fashionable and drew celebrity guests. By 1969, however, it has sunk from tawdry to tatty. The hotel has lost its casino license and nearly all of its customers. The clerk seems surprised when any show up at all. The several that show up on a single day prove more than he can handle. Jeff Bridges is an ex-con posing as a priest. He had buried money from a robbery under the floorboards of one of the rooms back in the 1950s. After Dakota Johnson checks in, she drags into her room a younger woman (Cailee Spaeny) whom she appears to be holding hostage, but things are not quite what they seem. Nor is the young woman. Another guest is Cynthia Arivo who has plans to be a solo singer after previously singing Motown backup. Chris Hemsworth (not a guest per se, but present in the film) is a dangerous cult-leader with charisma that Charlie Manson could only wish to have. A fellow who appears to be an obnoxious salesman is actually (not a spoiler: it is an early reveal) an FBI agent; the hotel, it turns out, has been designed to surveil on guests with microphones and one-way mirrors. The clerk, who has assisted with the surveillance, is a troubled man.

Bad Times at the El Royale unfolds leisurely for 2 hours and 21 minutes. This is not from sloppy editing however. Goddard wants us to understand the characters. We do, and we empathize with several of them even though all are morally compromised to varying degrees. The presentation is nonlinear: we get backstories for the characters in flashbacks and overlapping perspectives. Suspense interspersed by moments of violence throughout the movie keep it from dragging. Everything is helped by a first rate cast.

This movie is surely not for everyone – definitely not for anyone with only a 5 minute attention span – but it has something to offer for viewers with a tad more patience.

**** ****

Blues guitarist/singer/songwriter Samantha Fish still is more up-and-comer than veteran, but she is close to the border. Her style is retro in a good way, which is why audiences at her live shows are a jumble of ages from Generation Z to… well… me. She performs a lot of original material, but her choice of covers tells the tale. On her recent cover album Chills and Fever (which followed the Wild Heart album containing 10 originals) the title track was a hit for Tom Jones in 1964, “Either Way I Lose” was a Nina Simone number, “He Did It” was Jackie DeShannon, “Hello Stanger” was Barbara Lewis, Little Baby was recorded by the Bristols, and so on. The sound may be throwback, but it works.

Her act is worth catching live, which is what I did last week at Sony Hall in New York City. It was a sold out show and one of her usual fine performances with an opening by Jonathan Long. The one drawback was the 7:00 PM time, which on a weekday in NYC is a nightmare for traffic. By the time I got to the theater after battling rush hour and parking delays,  all seats were taken and there was standing room only. That was fine for me, but I’m glad I went alone and didn’t have to worry about an unhappy companion. One cranky patron groused as he passed by me en route to the exit, “I want to be comfortable!” It was the minority view, however, and if Samantha comes to your town I recommend dropping in and staying, whether in a seat or on your feet.

**** ****

After the Saucers Landed by Douglas Lain

The year is 1992 – an alternative 1992 in which Pleideans (as Lain chooses to spell Pleiadeans: probably just so he could snicker at someone who corrected the spelling for fictional entities) had landed the previous year. Their appearance and that of their ships are simultaneously reassuring and disappointing. Straight out of 50s-70s B movies, they are attractive Nordics in sequined jumpsuits who spout New Age philosophy. They shake hands with George H. W. Bush on the White House lawn. Ultimately, after the initial surprise wears off, the aliens don’t seem very interesting and so most people don’t take much interest in them. The Pleideans hint, however, that perhaps earthlings themselves determined the alien appearance and influenced the presentation of their philosphy. The novel is full of affectionate pop culture references from the last half of the 20^th century, and most especially from the 90s.

I expected rather less of this book than it turned out to have. I expected lightweight absurdist humor and a parody of old cheesy scifi, but while there is some of that I mostly got metafiction. The parody, to the extent there is parody, is of current academic notions about culture in general.

The narrator of the novel is professor of English Brian Johnson, who both made and damaged his career by collaborating with UFO researcher Harold Flint. All their previous work seems to have been made meaningless when the saucers land. Brian renews his interest and tries to reengage Harold, however, when a Pleidean woman named Asket assumes the persona of his wife Virginia. All the Pleideans, it seems, are able to assume other identities and actually to switch bodies. Identity, Asket explains, is just a matter of thought. The universe is “imaginary.” Brian begins to believe there something dangerous in the Pleideans’ airy message. He fears for his own identity.

After the Saucers Landed does have a plot. There is a story arc from a start to a finish, but along the way there is much philosophizing of the sort one is likely to hear most often in a college dorm – especially if enhanced by certain herbal applications. If you don’t mind this (or might even be nostalgic for it), Lain’s book will be enjoyable enough. Besides, the 90s were a good decade even in an alternate universe.

Trailer for Bad Times at the El Royale

What's Your Angle?

Native English speakers grow up with an edge, but the edge is one of two on the same sword. English is not the most common first language in the world. Mandarin Chinese and Spanish both have more native speakers. As a second language, however, English is unmatched with some 1 billion speakers and they are spread around the world. Largely as a legacy of the colonial aptitude of the British in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then of American influence in the 20^th century, nations in which English is at least one of the official languages exist on every continent – even Antarctica if you count the scientific outposts – as well as numerous island outposts. Knowing the language is a big asset, so it is widely studied elsewhere. It has become the language of international commerce and air travel. The internet has hastened its global spread: some 60% of the content is in English. While that percentage surely will diminish as net access spreads, the role of English will remain outsized on the net for the foreseeable future.

The downside to being native speakers of English is something that can be overcome but, due to normal human laziness, commonly isn’t. Not needing to become at least marginally fluent in another language in order to get by at home and (in most cases) abroad, most Anglophones don’t. Even though another language is a requirement in high school and (generally) college, without regular use the skills (if any) acquired by students soon fade. My own high school Spanish evaporated long ago; my Latin, strangely, has fared somewhat better, but that is not as useful as one might imagine. Hence the common joke:

Q: If a polyglot is someone who speaks many languages, what do you call a person who speaks only one?

A: An American.

(I’ve heard the same joke with “Englishman” as the answer.)

The history of any language is interesting in its own way. Lithuanian, for example, is interesting for having evolved less than most: it is believed to be closer to proto-Indo-European than any extant language and shares some grammatical forms with Sanskrit that have vanished from other European tongues. The history of English couldn’t be more different from that. The accidents of history remolded it time and again while expanding it from a minor regional dialect to its current global reach. A readable and compendious book on the subject is The Story of English by Joseph Piercy.

The language has been an unlikely survivor, in large part because of its ability to absorb and transform. Britain had been highly Latinized during the centuries as a Roman province, but the Angle, Saxon, and Jute invaders brushed all that aside with surprising speed. Their North Germanic tongue became what we now call Old English, which then survived (while absorbing vocabulary from) the Viking invasions. It survived in turn (while transforming into Middle English) the Norman Conquest despite the aristocracy speaking French for many years afterward. It survived and was enriched by the deliberate Latinization of the early Modern English period. It survived and thrived in the turbulent history that followed. Given its 184 page length, Piercy's book contains a lot of information, citations, and quotes about all this. Recommended.

A good complement to Piercy is The Vulgar Tongue: Green’s History of Slang by Jonathan Green. Slang, after all, is the leading edge of language. It is notoriously hard to define, but we know it when we hear it – at least until it becomes part of the “legitimate” language, if it ever does. Some slang has survived yet remained slang for centuries. Some is absorbed into polite speech. Most comes and goes in a few decades. There are few people who know the subject better than Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang (with 110,000 entries and 415,000 citations) and consultant for the OED. In The Vulgar Tongue he relates the history of slang rather than compiling definitions, though naturally this requires numerous examples. There are side excursions into regional (e.g. Australian), ethnic, and social group (e.g. jazz and beatnik) slang. The subject has attracted scholars from the time English became a literary enough language to have a polite form along with a vulgar one. (During the Norman period, arguably there was no slang: all English was the common tongue.) In the 18^th century, for example, along with Samuel Johnson’s landmark dictionary was Francis Grose’ A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). The word “slang,” which of course is not slang, first appears in a dictionary title in 1859. Green’s book is also recommended, especially in conjunction with Piercy.

The core of literary English actually has been remarkably stable since the 17^th century. Shakespeare remains easily readable, much as high school students might demur to that assessment. His style might not be simple, but beyond a small percentage of archaic words the content poses no real obstructions. The language has added numerous words and phrases since then but has subtracted relatively few. It would be fun to hear English spoken in a century to find out if polite speech remains the same, what current slang still infuses everyday speech, what sounds laughably archaic to the then speakers, and what has been added and from where. I suspect that for me this is an unlikely prospect.

Clip from Ball of Fire (1941). Gary Cooper is an ivory tower English Professor tasked with writing an article on slang for a new encyclopedia. He wishes to interview nightclub performer Barbara Stanwyck (who mistakes him at first for a detective) for her expertise on modern slang.

The Time of Our Lives

A week has passed, which is long enough for most of us to have adjusted to the annoying spring ritual of Daylight Savings Time. Even the stray cat that daily cadged food at my door all winter at 8 a.m. Eastern Savings Time (and not before) now shows up at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and not later. People (and apparently stray cats) are adaptable creatures, so why fuss about a simple clock change? Because the time change wreaks havoc on everything from personal health to train schedules, and it doesn’t accomplish the supposed goal of saving energy more than negligibly if at all. It’s not clear that it did anything useful back in 1916 when it was instituted as a wartime measure to conserve coal. Even if it did save a few lumps back then, which is uncertain, a wartime mandate to open schools, government offices, and factories an hour earlier would have served just as well. Today, anyone who might wish to make use of an earlier sunrise could get up earlier with or without changing the nominal time. Businesses can change their hours, too if they choose.

Older than I am, my wall clock has been
adjusted to DST 70 times and ST 69. It
never complains.

The negative effects of Daylight Savings are far from negligible. Most of them derive directly or indirectly from sleep deprivation. According to Popular Science workplace injuries rise 5.7% on the Monday after the switch. This is not matched by a decline when the clocks turn back in autumn. Fatal car crashes in the US rise 5.4% for the entire week after the springtime change as tired drivers make mistakes. There is a whopping 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday after the start of DST but this is nearly balanced by a 21% drop on the Monday after the switch back to Standard Time, so we’ll call that one a wash. Try to avoid having a court date on the Monday after the start of DST though; cranky judges sentence convicts to 5% longer terms on that day. Crime rates drop slightly during DST, it is true, but this probably has nothing to do with the nominal time and everything to do with the natural phenomenon of more daylight hours that time of year. Darkness is simply better for crime, and there is less of it in spring and summer.

So why don’t we just give up on the whole idea? Inertia is the only plausible answer. It is hard for people to stop doing what they habitually do. It is why Americans stubbornly use English measurements despite metric having been official in the US (yes, it really is) since the Metric Act of 1866. Besides, Congress would have to act on abandoning DST, and Congress no longer can act on anything even in a bad cause much less a good one.

This is as good a place as any to absolve poor old Benjamin Franklin of the frequently heard charge of having come up with the idea for Daylight Savings. Ben was an early victim of Poe’s Law, which reads, “Without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.” In other words, no matter how obvious your satire might seem to you, someone will take you seriously. Franklin was joking.

The source of the charge is a letter written by Ben in the spring of 1784 to The Journal of Paris. Ben was in Paris as a diplomat for the fledgling United States. He and his companions (and, one may guess, the editors of The Paris Journal) enjoyed the nightlife. They went to bed late and arose late. In the letter he relates his remarkable discovery. One night, as usual, he “went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight” but on this occasion neglected to close the shutters on the window. He was awakened at six o’clock by sunlight streaming through the un-shuttered window and thought it “extraordinary that the sun should rise so early.” He realizes the editors of the journal might be skeptical: “Yet it so happens, that when I speak of this discovery to others, I can easily perceive by their countenances, though they forbear expressing it in words, that they do not quite believe me.” After reiterating the truth of the matter, he goes on to explain how all that unused sunlight can be exploited, because “a discovery which can be applied to no use, or is not good for something, is good for nothing.” He estimates the number of candles used by 100,000 Parisian families at night and calculates that shifting their schedules earlier would save 96,075,000 livres in the six months between the spring and autumnal equinoxes: “An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”

“All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days,” he opines, after which people would adjust. To help them make the adjustment he recommends imposing taxes on candles, regulations on candle shops, and fines on homeowners with closed shutters, while letting “cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.”

I’ve heard sillier proposals, and (Nathan Poe’s admonition notwithstanding) not as satire.

The Chambers Brothers – Time Has Come Today

Second Law

The likelihood of a light bulb burning out is inversely related to its accessibility. That is probably untrue even though it somehow seems right. The first household light bulb I need to replace in 2019 is near the peak of a cathedral ceiling. No big deal, of course, though it means getting the extension ladder, which is half-buried in snow next to the barn. Winter is lingering in this region this year. (“Barn” probably evokes a grander image than to which the structure is entitled.)  The LED replacement should last a while – in fact it might be sensible to replace the other three incandescent bulbs with LEDs while I’m up there. It is a tiny harbinger of things to come, for, despite appearances, spring approaches. That is good in a general way (I’m not especially fond of winter), but it is a season for repairs and maintenance largely neglected in the winter months.

On average, an untended house will self-destruct in about 40 years. My house is 40 years old. It is not untended, but – just as in the case of a typical 40-year-old human – entropy is outpacing rehabilitation. It is possible to build for the ages, and we have much ancient monumental architecture still standing (more or less) to prove it. But unless you have the financial resources of an empire and a workforce of thousands at your disposal to build your home, it is more likely that before four decades are out you will be fighting a losing battle with entropy along with the rest of us. It is probably no coincidence that humans and their homes enter middle-age in about the same length of time. Anything that happens four decades from now is likely to be Somebody Else’s Problem. We certainly don’t want to spend present-day money on Somebody Else’s Problem, so we don’t. My own house was built by my parents for themselves and it served them well with negligible trouble in the 22 years they had to enjoy it. (If I can keep it four more years from today I’ll have owned it longer than they did, which is somehow unsettling.) Middle-age aches and pains crept into the property (and me) since then.

The barn

What happens in four decades? Roof shingles curl, window caulking dries, fogging between the panes of double-glazed windows occurs, siding rots, furnaces fail, water heaters leak, garage door openers quit, locks seize, etc. Even masonry is at risk as moisture seeps into it and freezes. Water in one form or other is always the single biggest threat. Regular readers of this blog (there are a few) have seen mentions in it of re-shingling, wall repairs, window replacement, and so on at my place. I haven’t mentioned a myriad other problems including worn-out central air units, plumbing issues, loose bathroom tiles, bad fixtures, stripped tiles in the pool, and malfunctioning mechanicals of various types. Along with essential repairs (e.g. roof shingles) I make genuinely useful repairs (e.g. water heaters) while tending to put off unimportant ones such as a bad recessed closet light fixture accessible only from an awkward corner of the attic. I don’t expensively update the interior just for esthetic reasons, so my countertops are the same as those in The Brady Bunch kitchen while my bathroom tiles scream 1970s. We are often told that we can recover 70% of the cost of remodeling kitchens and baths through the increase they bring to the value of the house, but 1) that is true only if we sell the house before the remodeled kitchen and baths in turn age noticeably and 2) 70% is not 100% so from a purely economic standpoint we’re better off leaving those remodels to the next owner. If you have enough money to make these upgrades for the personal enjoyment of it, that is, of course, another matter. Perhaps if the next Pick-6 numbers go my way I’ll say goodbye to the Bradys, but not before.

My strategy for personal aging is similar. I tend to issues that would accelerate decline if I don’t tend to them (e.g. dental upkeep), but accept the small stuff (e.g. thinning hair) without fighting it. There are differences between entropy of lumber and flesh, of course. A proper diet and workout routine can put you in better shape this decade than you were last decade. (It won’t put you in better shape than you would have been a decade earlier had you followed the routine then, but still…) Giving your house a workout doesn’t help. It hurts. On the other hand, if you have the resources you can strip a house down to the studs and rebuild it so it is effectively new. We can’t (as yet anyway) strip ourselves down to the skeleton and slap a new body on it, and I’m not so sure that would be a good idea if we could.

Anyway, starting in a few weeks I’ll return to fixing up what I can while the forces of nature lean inexorably the other way. Camus said Sisyphus is happy, and I suppose I am, too, on balance. Besides, even assuming I hang onto this place until the end (a mighty big assumption), soon enough it will be Somebody Else’s Problem.

R.L. Burnside – Everything is Broken

It’s a Mystery

The answer to what is the most popular genre of fiction in the US depends on how you define popular. In pure number of copies sold, children’s literature is far and away the most popular, but the total page count (never mind word count) puts it well down the list. What about adult fiction? According to surveys the mystery/detective/thriller genre is most popular, and about half of all regular fiction readers (who are a minority of the adult population) have read at least one mystery novel in the past year. Yet sales figures from publishers show that “adult general fiction” sells more copies than mysteries. Are the respondents lying? Maybe, though it is entirely possible that they buy more general fiction but actually like the mysteries they read better, so in their minds they are telling the truth. The most profitable genre for publishers is neither mysteries nor general fiction but romance literature including some types of erotica such as Fifty Shades of Grey. Romance fiction (surprisingly, given the state of the real thing at present) is the second most popular adult genre according to surveys. Fantasy and science fiction aren’t far behind, trailed by historical fiction and various niche categories. (Considering Young Adult fiction as a separate category confuses matters further since it overlaps each of the other genres.) However you crunch the numbers though, the mystery/detective/thriller genre is high on the list as it has been for the better part of two centuries. It is high on my list as well. My own taste in mysteries includes classic noir-ish fare from the likes of Raymond Chandler, darker fare from the likes of Jeff Lindsay (the Dexter novels), and crossover historical-mysteries from the likes of Lindsey Davis (the Falco stories set in ancient Rome). Then there is Boris Akunin, whose novel Black City I just finished.

Anyone who is a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but hasn’t met Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin needs to do so now. Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, who was born in Tbilisi in 1956 but grew up in Moscow after 1958. After university he was not an instant success as a writer, but by the late 1990s his crime fiction had found its audience. His best-known recurring character is the fictional detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes. (One novella by Akunin is a crossover story featuring both Holmes and Fandorin who find themselves on the same case in France.) There are 15 books (12 in English) featuring the detective Erast Fandorin starting with The Winter Queen set in 1876 when Fandorin is a 20-y.o. clerk in the police department. Black City is the most recent when Fandorin is a 58-y.o. experienced private detective with imperial connections. There might or might not be a 16th book later this year or next year. The Fandorin stories have an underlying ominousness to them since we all know what happens in Russia after July 1914. The events in Black City take place (mostly) in the oil city of Baku in July 1914. All the books are enjoyable detective fiction, but for anyone new to the series I’d recommend both The Winter Queen and Black City (English translation published 2018), which bookend Fandorin’s career and personal life nicely.

The novel takes us first to Yalta where Fandorin is tricked into exposing the Tsar’s security chief to an assassin. He has reason to believe the plot was the work of a Bolshevik terrorist mastermind known as the Woodpecker. Fandorin, insulted and embarrassed by being used this way, follows a slim lead that the Woodpecker may be in the colorfully diverse oil city of Baku where a strike by petroleum workers is underway that could cripple Russia at time of diplomatic crisis while also possibly triggering wider revolution. As it happens, Fandorin’s actress wife is also in Baku where a movie starring her is being made. The thrill long since has gone from their marriage. Fandorin encounters intrigue, seduction, and betrayal involving ruthless oil magnates, bandits, terrorists, corrupt officials, foreign agents, moviemakers, and revolutionaries. Meantime there is the matter of an incident far away in Sarajevo. Russia without the calamity of World War One and its Revolutionary consequences is one of the great might-have-beens of history, and there seems a chance that Fandorin’s activities might just incidentally prevent the war. Even though we know in advance that they don’t, the reader can’t help hoping somehow they do.

This is a solid entry in the Fandorin series as a mystery novel, as a period piece, and as an adventure tale. Thumbs Up.

Akunin talks briefly about Fandorin