While I'm Away ...

I know, I know. I haven't been keeping things up over here. But I should have some new stuff soon. In the meantime, I have kept up that little sidebar box headed "Stuff worth reading" because ... you know, because it's really stuff worth reading.

Poll Tactics

The pollsters seem to have got my number. Since I first posted about being surveyed a couple of months ago, I've been called by a poll asking questions about the candidates for the California Assembly from my district, and then last night I got a call from the Rasmussen pollers.

It was a robopoll -- press one if you're a Republican, two if you're a Democrat, and so on. So since I had nothing better to do at the time, I sat there beeping out my answers to a variety of questions having to do with the election. It started with my opinion of George W. Bush, which I was happy to give -- even though I wished there was something more emphatic than a number five ("highly unfavorable") I could punch in. Something like 911.

And then, curiously, the robovoice asked my opinion of "Governor Brian Schweitzer." At first I thought I had misheard, and that the voice was having trouble pronouncing "Arnold Schwarzenegger," but I was pretty sure that there was a Brian Schweitzer who was governor somewhere (turns out, it's Montana -- I don't read Daily Kos for nothing), so I punched in "no opinion." So now I wonder if Rasmussen got its wires crossed somewhere and really thought they were calling Montana, or if the question was just thrown in to see if I was paying attention.

Anyway, I got to choose between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then between Obama and McCain, and then the questions turned to hot button issues, like whether I was "pro-choice" or "pro-life." I bristled a little at this one, since I don't think that to be pro-choice is to be "anti-life." And sure enough, the poll asked if, knowing that McCain is "pro-life" and Obama is "pro-choice," I still wanted to vote for Obama. I did.

And then the pollvoice asked whether I thought "illegal" -- i.e., undocumented -- immigrants should have driver's licenses. I do. I don't want anyone who hasn't passed a driving test out there on the roads where I'm driving or walking. McCain, the poll informed me, opposes such licenses, and Obama favors them. Do I still want to vote for Obama? Well, sure.

The whole business left me wondering if Rasmussen -- which I gather is not a particularly highly regarded poll -- was twisting the questions toward McCain. Early in the survey, I was asked which of several issues (e.g., the economy, immigration, moral values, etc.) was of most importance to me. I beeped that the war was uppermost. But there were no "McCain favors staying in Iraq, Obama wants to get out" questions.

So was I being push-polled? I don't know, but it sure felt like it.

I'm Back. Did You Miss Me?

Sheesh! I didn't realize it had been that long since I posted. Truth is, I've been working on the infrastructure of my other blog and neglecting this one. Plus, I haven't published any new reviews lately. And, well, my life isn't exactly crowded with incident, and I don't have anything new to say about politics. (Other folks have, and I've provided some links to it in the "Stuff worth reading" box.)

I did notice today that Jane Smiley's novel Ten Days in the Hills has just come out in paper. So here's my review of it that ran when the book first appeared.

TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS
By Jane Smiley
Anchor, 544 pp., $14.95 paperback

It’s an old trick: You put together a group of people in a semi-isolated setting such as a country house or a vacation retreat and see what happens. It’s worked in everything from Chekhov’s plays to Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game to Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (and its source, Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night).

Jane Smiley also has something even older in mind: Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which ten Florentines escape the plague-threatened city for ten days. She seems to have approached her new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, as a kind of “thought experiment,” letting the story grow out of the characters. What would happen if a pair of lovers, Max and Elena, were joined at his home by Max’s daughter and Elena’s son, plus Max’s ex-wife, Zoe, and her current lover? And what if you added in Zoe’s mother and three more of their friends? And set the novel at a time of political and social tension?

And what if you made Max a movie director, Elena a successful writer of how-to books and Zoe a famous movie star? And what if you put Max’s house in a spectacular hillside setting in Pacific Palisades? And instead of plague, made the threatening event the Iraq war, setting the novel at its beginning in March 2003? And made Elena a staunch opponent of the war, and one of Max’s friends just as strongly in favor of it?

What would you get? You know already: a lot of talk and a lot of sex. Something for everyone.

Or not. The trouble with the talk is that so much of it is predictable. It’s Hollywood, so they talk about movies and food and real estate and the quest for eternal youth. But Smiley has been an outspoken critic of the war and the Bush administration, blogging on both at Huffingtonpost.com, and the passages of debate between Elena and Max’s old boyhood friend Charlie are so filled with the by now too-familiar pros and cons of the Iraq misadventure that they bring the novel to an eye-glazing halt.

At least there’s the sex, which Smiley is generous with. Max is having a little dysfunction problem, brought about in part by the standstill in his career, so Elena is solicitous in her attempts to arouse him. Zoe is nearing the end of her relationship with Paul, a New Agey “healer,” so she checks out Elena’s son, Simon, a handsome and sexually adventurous young slacker who has recently shaved his head so he can play the role of a phallus in a student film. Simon is happy to get it on with anyone, female or male, who’s willing. As for Max and Zoe’s daughter, Isabel, she’s been having a secret affair with Max’s agent, Stoney, since she was a teenager.

At the midpoint of the ten days that these ten characters spend together, the whole ensemble is invited to the fabulous but somewhat sinister home -- Shangri-la crossed with the Hearst Castle -- of a Russian entrepreneur (read: gangster). The Bel-Air estate is filled with secret treasures, including a hitherto unknown Vermeer and what may just be the actual Amber Room that vanished after being looted from the Russians by the Nazis.

The Russian proposes to bankroll a film version of Gogol’s Taras Bulba that would be more faithful to the story than the 1962 Yul Brynner/Tony Curtis clunker. Max is trying to decide between directing this epic, to be filmed on the steppes of Ukraine, and a two-character movie about a man and woman talking and making love -- a kind of NC-17-rated version of My Dinner With Andre.

The satiric potential is obvious, and Smiley exploits it. Yet she also gives her characters depth and plausibility, which works against merely using them to lampoon Hollywood fads, excesses and attitudes. All of them, even the movie star and her guru, are smarter and more self-aware than we expect them to be, which makes it harder to poke fun at them. The ten days we spend in the hills with them aren’t wasted, and there are some brightly comic moments, some poignant ones (as well as too many dull ones). But as the saying goes, “fish and visitors begin to smell after three days.” Like the characters themselves, we’re glad when the visit’s over and we can get on with our lives.

The Prophet

This review appeared today in the Houston Chronicle:

SONG YET SUNG
By James McBride
Riverhead, 368 pp., $25.95

This a novel in which people say things like:

“-- With all I seen, I don’t know that I believe in God anymore….

“-- Don’t matter…. He believes in you.”

And:

“-- Every truth is a lie. I heard that said. Only tomorrow is truthful.”

But Song Yet Sung rises above its author’s sometimes clumsy attempts at profundity, because James McBride knows how to tell a story. His earlier novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is being filmed by Spike Lee, and his memoir, The Color of Water, about growing up in an interracial family, is widely read in schools.

Song Yet Sung is set in 1850 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a place of swamps and oysters, where watermen navigate the inlets of Chesapeake Bay and a handful of farmers try to control their restive slaves. The central character is a beautiful slave, Liz Spocott. When we first meet her, however, she’s not so beautiful: She has been shot in the face and is being held captive with other runaway slaves.

In her delirium, Liz has one of her prophetic dreams, “of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed … of colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards – every bit of pride, decency, and morality squeezed clean out of them.”

Liz is known, for obvious reasons, as “the Dreamer,” and what she dreams about the future of black Americans is for the moment not hopeful, though much later she will dream about Martin Luther King Jr. – “he speaks to a magic pipe that carries his voice for miles. … And the people, colored and white, red and yellow, man and woman, they hold hands and weep at his words.”

As she recovers from her wound she discovers that she’s being kept in an attic with a dozen other captives. One of them is an old woman who tells her bits of “the code” – a secret method that slaves have developed to communicate over long distances. But the woman doesn’t tell her the parts of the code outright; instead, she couches them in gnomic utterances: “the coach wrench turns the wagon wheel. … Scratch a line in the dirt to make a friend. … Use double wedding rings when you marry. Tie the wedding knot five times. … And find the blacksmith if you’re gonna marry.” And so on. Liz will decipher much of the code after she and the others break out of their confinement and scatter.

Liz and the others have been trapped by Patty Cannon, who makes a living by snatching up runaways and stealing slaves, then selling them south. Patty Cannon was a real person, although McBride has fudged the facts: She died in 1829 and her house, where Liz is held captive, was torn down in 1848. Patty was said to be a large, handsome woman who could out-wrestle any man and delighted in doing so. In addition to Patty, Liz is also being tracked by Denwood Long, a man known as “the Gimp” because of his bad leg, who has been hired by her owner to bring her back.

There are killings and kidnappings and betrayals in this involving tale of flight and pursuit. Patty Cannon is a marvelously evil villain, and the Gimp turns out to be a man in search of redemption. There’s also a giant, mute, mysterious fugitive slave called the Woolman, who hides in the depths of the forest, having learned how to blend with it. There are so many characters, in fact, that Liz the Dreamer recedes into the background – she’s the cause of the action but not much of a participant in it. But along Liz’s journey, the reader discovers some of the secrets of “the code”: a system of communication based on patterns in quilts, knots in ropes, the way crates are stacked on a wharf, and the rhythms clanged out by a blacksmith on an anvil.

The chief problem with the novel is that Liz’s visions of the future often go way over the top, as in this prophetic image: “his body was adorned with shiny jewelry – around his neck, his fingers, even in his mouth. A thousand drums seemed to play behind him, and as he spoke with the rat-tat-tat speed of a telegraph machine, he preached murder, and larceny, cursing women savagely and promising to kill, maim, and destroy.” McBride, who studied music composition at Oberlin, has let his distaste for the commercialized culture of hip-hop betray him into a sour, moralizing didacticism.

For the truth is, his novel doesn’t need contemporary references, or even Liz’s clairvoyant dreams, to make its point. For he has a great and durable theme: the quest for freedom. Even his white characters are hemmed in by the peculiar institution of slavery, unable to free themselves from the constant anxiety and guilt in which it traps them. On this theme, the dialogue he gives his characters is occasionally eloquent. Here, Liz has told an old man about her vision of the preacher we recognize as King:

“-- If that preacher you seen in your dream was hollering ’bout being free … well, then, he wasn’t free, now, was he? How long that gonna take? What time of tomorrow was you dreaming about?

“-- I don’t know, she said. I said I would tell you of tomorrow. I didn’t say tomorrow wasn’t gonna hurt.”

Words Fail Me

Damn the New York Times! They just made my work harder.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Politics

I don't get it. Less than a week after Barack Obama's candid speech about race, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been caught in ... misstatements. (I'm not being candid, either.) Hillary claims she "misspoke" when she talked about being under sniper fire in Bosnia -- after videotape shows her sauntering across the tarmac with Chelsea to accept some flowers from a little girl. And McCain blames a slip of the tongue for his assertion that Iran is training Al-Qaida insurgents -- even though video shows that his tongue slipped at least four times.

What's going on here? Have these guys never heard of YouTube? It led me to imagine this scenario:

A conference room with two tables set up with computers. Both monitors are displaying the home page for YouTube. Barack Obama enters, and ushers Hillary Clinton and John McCain to the chairs in front of the computers.

Obama: Hillary, John, thanks for coming. I know how busy you are, but I really felt we needed to have this session.

McCain: Not a problem. I'm not doing anything much but watching you guys slug it out.

Clinton: Thank you, Barack.

Obama: The reason I asked you here, is that I think the campaign has gone off track. We're not getting our messages across about the issues. We're spending too much time apologizing for misspeaking.

Clinton: Right. You and your "typical white person." (She giggles.)

Obama: (Irritably.) Not quite what I had in mind, Hillary. You see, I don't think you're aware of what an influence YouTube is having on politics.

Clinton: YouTube? Oh, right. Chelsea showed me the scary hamster.

McCain: Hamster? I had to eat one of those when I was a P.O.W. in Iran.

Obama: Vietnam.

McCain: Pardon?

Obama: You were a P.O.W. in Vietnam, John. Not Iran.

McCain: If you say so. Maybe I misspoke.

Obama: Well, that's the point. Every time you or Hillary or I say something, millions of people go to YouTube and check it out to see if we're lying. Everything we say or do in public winds up there. And so does everything our friends and supporters say and do.

Hillary: Everything? (She turns to the computer with interest.)

Obama: Yes, including Rev. Wright's sermons. That's how they got me in trouble.

McCain: (Chuckles.) Really got your tail in a crack there, didn't you, son? Imagine I'll get some mileage out of that this fall.

Clinton: He wasn't my pastor. You'll be running against me.

Obama: Oh, lay off it, Hillary. Anyway, I thought you might want to know about this YouTube thing. I mean, it's really important: It helped Jim Webb defeat George Allen after the "macaca" incident.

Clinton: So you say everything's on here? How do I check up on Bill?

McCain: I want to see the scary hamster.

Speak the Speech, I Pray Thee...

Interesting. According to this quiz, I'm from the Northeast.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
The Midland
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Words of Wisdom

"Immediate rest is the best remedy for a bad idea insisting to be blogged."

--James Wolcott

What I Meant to Say Was ...

I was doing some research online this week... Okay, I was Googling my own name. Like you haven't done that. Anyway, I ran across some quotations from one of my reviews in a very unexpected place: a couple of Web sites devoted to "intelligent design."

Now, I happen to think that the intelligent-design argument is hokum, an attempt to undermine the credibility of what seems to me perfectly credible: the scientific evidence for human evolution. I'm certainly no scientist, but it seems to me perfectly evident that evolution is established science and that human beings, being biological creatures, are as subject to evolutionary process as any other biological creatures.

What continually amazes me is that perfectly sane people, here in America, seem to have doubts about evolution -- at least according to pollsters (whose scientific methods I don't entirely trust).

This is the review, written some time ago for the Mercury News, that the intelligent-design hucksters seized upon. The key passages that they quoted from it are highlighted:

THE FIRST HUMAN: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors
By Ann Gibbons
Anchor, 336 pp., $14.95 paperback

According to a Gallup poll taken in 2004, 45 percent of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago." More than 50 years after the Scopes trial, and 135 years after Darwin published "The Descent of Man," lots of people still find it hard to believe in human evolution.

But though the fuss over "intelligent design" and other anti-evolutionary arguments has made a lot of headlines lately, it barely surfaces in Ann Gibbons' colorful and readable book about the search for human origins. In "The First Human," Gibbons, who reports on human evolution for Science magazine, gives a lucid account of the science involved in finding fossils, establishing how old they are, and ascertaining whether they in fact belong to the ancestors of humankind. She also shows how difficult and sometimes dangerous the work of hunting for 7 million-year-old fossils can be. And that, like most humans, anthropologists are subject to such emotions as ambition and jealousy, especially when they're Indiana Jonesing for the next big find.

Not even the most charismatic anthropologist swashbuckles like Harrison Ford, but some of them do have touches of glamour. "With his complex character and dark humor he could have sprung from a Hemingway novel," Gibbons says of Tim White, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1993 White and his team were flown from San Francisco to Ethiopia in billionaire Gordon Getty's private jet, because Getty's wife, Ann, was studying anthropology at UC-Berkeley and was a field worker in the expedition.

But White is also a no-nonsense type who likes to demonstrate the harsh reality of fossil-hunting for lecture audiences. He tells them that to re-create the conditions in the Afar rift of Ethiopia, he would have to heat the auditorium to 100 degrees, "blow in dust and sand, and bring in two dump trucks filled with scorpions, snakes, and malarial mosquitoes." In the course of his research, White has contracted malaria, Gibbons reports, as well as giardia, dysentery, hepatitis and pneumonia.

White is not the only fossil-hunter who has suffered. Richard Leakey lost both legs when he crashed his plane in Kenya, and field workers have been killed by bandits and warring tribes. Teams are often threatened by the volatile politics of post-colonial Africa, where virtually all field research into human ancestry is conducted. One researcher was expelled from Ethiopia because of suspicions that he was working for the CIA. During the political turmoil of the 1980s, all fossil research in Ethiopia was halted by the country's government for eight years.

And sometimes competing research teams are a threat to one another. Leakey virtually sewed up paleontology research in Kenya by cutting a deal with the government, and rival researcher Martin Pickford was arrested when he tried to make an end run around that arrangement. But Pickford could be equally protective of what he considered to be his turf. He once charged a Yale University team with raiding and corrupting a fossil site he laid claim to. When a Yale researcher returned to the site, she was met by a man who challenged the validity of her permits and added to the intimidation by flashing a gun tucked into his waistband.

These tensions and turf wars arise because the rewards for discoveries – foundation grants, academic tenure, awards, prizes and public acclaim – have escalated since Donald Johanson's celebrated discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, a 3.1 million-year-old hominid popularly known as "Lucy," in 1974. Lucy's reign as the oldest known human ancestor lasted for nearly 20 years. Then in 1992 a team including White and Japanese paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa discovered Ardipithecus ramidus, which has been dated at 4.4 million years old, and a string of other discoveries followed over the next decade. The latest of them, by Michel Brunet in Chad in 2002, potentially pushes back known human ancestry to 6 or 7 million years ago.

Nothing that old is in good shape, of course. We're not talking about complete skeletons but about teeth, the occasional jawbone or skull or thighbone, sometimes on the verge of crumbling into chalky dust. But in every case there's just enough to convince researchers, and their peers that review their research, that a hominid, and not an ancestor of an ape, has been found. But usually there's also little enough to provoke ongoing controversy.

Which is why the layperson asks, as a journalist did at a symposium that brought together some of the eminent discoverers: "Why do you scientists always argue about your fossils? Why don't you share the fossils?" Gibbons points out that one reason is that the fossils don't belong to the researchers, they're "the priceless property of the nations where they were found." But she also explains that consensus would be hard to reach even if the hominid scraps were gathered in one place. "Together, the fossils collected in the 1990s and early 2000s would cover a large desk and would represent a few dozen individuals at least," she notes. But too many pieces are still missing from the puzzle – including fossils of the ancestors of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas – to allow for a clear picture of the evolutionary lineage.

So in the end, "The First Human" is a bit like a detective story without a conclusion, or like a detective story that puts Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, V.I. Warshawski, Easy Rawlins and Gil Grissom all in the same room, gives them a handful of clues, and lets them argue endlessly about the solution. The characters in Gibbons' book are almost as colorful and cantankerous as those fictional sleuths. Science writing is rarely this entertaining.

_____________________

It's easy to see what the intelligent designers are up to: snatching from the context of the review sentences that suggest anthropologists are scrabbling and competitive types, some of whom are not very nice, and that their evidence doesn't amount to much.

Okay, granted that that's sort of what I meant, it was hardly my intent to undermine their credibility. On the contrary, I meant to admire the persistence and the diligence with which anthropologists conduct their work, their ability to discern evolutionary change from fossils that most laypersons would casually crush under their feet. And that although tempers flare, grudges are held, and important finds are not readily shared, those are human failings, not signs that the science is fundamentally flawed.

Anyone who knows scientists, or academics of any stripe, knows that they can be petty and jealous people. But the truth will out, and the truth, as I see it, is that human evolution is a well-established fact, and that intelligent design is just an ad hoc, unscientific theory cooked up by ideologues whose earlier theory, "creationism," has imploded.

But the real lesson learned here is that I need to be more careful about tone in my reviews.

Murder Most French

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

MURDER IN THE RUE DE PARADIS
By Cara Black
Soho, 312 pp. $24

Cara Black loves Paris when it sizzles.

Of course, as the readers of her seven previous novels about quirky-chic private eye Aimée Leduc already know, Black just plain loves Paris.

In her latest, “Murder in the Rue de Paradis,” it’s the sweltering August of 1995, the month in which every Parisian who can deserts the city, leaving it to the tourists and those who can’t flee. Aimée is one of those who can’t – she has work to do. And then her old boyfriend, investigative journalist Yves Robert, turns up. Against her better judgment she sleeps with him, and to her astonishment he proposes marriage.

But in the morning he’s gone. Permanently. His body is found in the rue de Paradis. His throat has been slit, with a distinctive curling flourish at one end of the incision.

The police are no help: They arrest a suspect who dies in custody, but Aimée is certain that when Yves left their bed it wasn’t for an assignation with the junkie street hustler the cops had arrested. Still, the police are happy to consider the case closed, given that the force has more than it can handle with a series of bombings linked to an Islamist terrorist group.

Aimée’s attempt to find out who killed Yves will get her involved with Kurdish nationalists, their Turkish opponents and a sinister Iranian hit-woman. Aimée gets shot at, dislocates her shoulder, nearly winds up with her own throat slit, and breaks a heel on her Manolo Blahniks.

Black, who lives in San Francisco when she isn’t seeking out the pith and marrow of Paris, creates strong characters: Aimée is sort of a cross between Juliette Binoche and Angelina Jolie playing Lara Croft; her assistant, the dapper four-foot-tall René Friant, tries (and invariably fails) to keep her out of trouble. And there’s a memorable villain in the assassin Nadira, whose efficiency and ingenuity are matched by her fanaticism.

Black also crafts a well-shaped plot. Readers who are knowledgeable about the conventions of murder mysteries may spot Yves’ killer early on, but Black introduces enough ingenious fake-outs and red herrings to keep us off-balance. And even if you guess who did it, the question is why – although there Black cheats a little, having withheld the evidence that might have enabled Aimée (and the reader) to figure things out sooner.

But where Black really shines is at creating atmosphere. Her pages are alive with particulars – the sights, sounds, smells, geography, topography and history of the quartier of Paris where the novel is set. She makes the multicultural neighborhoods of the tenth arrondissement three-dimensional, providing more than just a backdrop; they serve as a framework for action, of which there is plenty.

And even better, Black makes the setting thematically relevant. For example, while seeking to understand the conflicts between Turks and Kurds and Sunni and Shi‘a that may have had something to do with Yves’ murder, Aimée is taken blindfolded to the hiding place of an exiled Turkish novelist, the object of a fatwa. After he explains who the various parties to the conflict are, she is guided from his hiding place by an elderly Jewish man. Again blindfolded and swathed in a chador, she can perceive only “the pungent smell of sandalwood incense and what sounded like muffled Hindi coming from somewhere in the hallway.”

When they pause in the old man’s apartment so she can remove the blindfold and the chador, she sees a wall filled with old photographs: “Black-and-white snapshots from the forties. … Now she noticed the yellow stars on the men’s lapels and the women’s sweaters, the uniformed Wehrmacht soldier to the side.

“Her throat caught. ‘They worked in the quartier?’

“ ‘At Lévitan, next door. And at Bassano and Austerlitz, the other labor camps on the Left Bank.’

“ ‘Labor camps? I had no idea.’

“ ‘Few do. Under L’Opération Meuble, the Boches took skilled workers from internment camps: jewelers to repair clocks, artisans to restore furniture and musical instruments, women couturiers to bleach and press linens – you name it – all looted from Jewish déportés apartments.’ ”

Leaving his apartment, Aimée “kept to the shadows and turned right into rue du Château d’Eau. The streetlight illuminated a building plaque. Jean Cazard and Pierre Chatenet, both eighteen years old and members of the Red Cross, shot by Germans, August 14, 1944. Just days before the Liberation. There were fresh lilacs in a vase fastened to the plaque. She shivered and hastened her steps. The past clung to these cobblestones and buildings as if it were just yesterday.”

Other times, other ethnic and political conflicts leading to injustice and murder. Black deftly makes the history of the city resonate with the contemporary conflicts that swarm around her characters. And by doing so, she lifts her novel out of the narrower confines of the genre in which it resides. “Murder in the Rue de Paradis” is a page-turner, but some of its pages invite you to linger and reflect.