Beyond Rivalry

From the NYT obit:

"Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London."

I can only pray someone says this about me someday, that I found the "ominous in the everyday" and, perhaps, both the noise within silence and the silence within noise ...

Also:

BBC death notice

Guardian obit and primer

Bill Gorton: "How did you go bankrupt?"

Mike Campbell: "Gradually, and then suddenly."

-- Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises

Just finished Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat (2008; published as A Cure for All Diseases in the UK), which was strong on Dalziel (still recuperating), introduced budding psychologist and sharp observer Charley Heywood through her emails, and brought back Franny Roote, who I'm convinced is a sociopath despite his own musings that he's not. Pascoe, Wield, Novello and Hat had minor roles this time, and Ellie was absent.

Some of my favourite bits:

Dalziel to Roote: "I can work out that you've been here long enough for our landlord to know you drink parrot piss!"

Roote: "Cranberry juice actually. ... Full of vitamins, you really ought to try it."

Dalziel: "Mebbe after morris dancing and incest."

Roote, describing Lady D: "She is, I believe, a very good hater."

In some Yorkshire pubs, the appearance of a stranger cuts off conversation like a toad in the blancmange ....

When Charley entered the lounge, Dalziel, occupying one of Tom Parker's low-slung Scandinavian chairs like the USA occupying Iraq, tried to lever himself upright but had difficulty formulating a satisfactory exit strategy.

Dalziel let out a sighing groan, or groaning sigh, the kind of sound that might well up from the soul of a tone-deaf man who has just realized the second act of Götterdämmerung is not the last.

PC Scroggs: "Thought it would be all right as he came along with the Super."

Some things didn't change. If the Prince of Darkness came along with the Super, that would be passport sufficient for all subsequent horned and hooved arrivals.

He spun around on his stool. The expression on his face made Munch's Scream look like a smiley.

PD James' latest Dalgliesh crime novel, The Private Patient (2008), is set largely in Devon at a manor house-cum-plastic surgery center. Central themes seem to include worthiness and what we deserve, revenge, redemption, forgiveness, the inability to forgive.

When the book opens, the reader is in the mind of the soon-to-be murder victim, Rhoda, and after her death, at various times we're privy to the thoughts and feelings of a number of other characters, including suspects and police. Rhoda turns out to be a rather single-minded and self-focused woman whose actions have been at least partially responsible for others' pain and harm, and by allowing us the victim's pov at the start, I think James aids our ability to sympathise with her.

Speaking of her family of origin, Rhoda recalls:

"Those outbursts of violence, the impotent rage, the shame, had done for them all. The important things had been unsayable. And looking into her mother's face, she asked herself how could she begin now? She thought her mother was right. It couldn't have been easy for her father to find that five-pound note week after week. It had come with a few words, sometimes in shaky handwriting: With love from Father. She had taken the money because she needed it and had thrown away the paper. With the casual cruelty of an adolescent, she had judged him unworthy to offer her his love, which she had always known was a more difficult gift than money. Perhaps the truth was that she hadn't been worthy to receive it."

Later, Dalgliesh, Kate and Benton are discussing the case over wine:

Benton says:

"People die because of who they are and what they are. Isn't that part of the evidence? I'd feel differently about the death of a child, a young person, the innocent."

Dalgliesh:

"Innocent? So you feel confident to make the distinction between the victims who deserve death and those who don't? ... Moral outrage is natural. Without it we're hardly human. But for a detective faced with the dead body of a child. the young, the innocent, making an arrest can become a personal campaign, and that's dangerous. It can corrupt judgment. Every victim deserves the same commitment."

This reminded me of a comment I read recently, attributed to Gil Bailie:

"Anything one does to champion the cause of the victim creates new victims, so then you have a shift in the marker, and the moral boomerang comes back upon those who were trying to champion the cause of victims and therefore made victims and therefore became victimizers and therefore the whole thing begins to shift again."

I think Dalgliesh is saying the same thing, though the line seems to so fine and the task so daunting -- to hear the victim, to do what one can to stop the making of victims (including recognising oneself as complicit in the ways we are), without making the avenging of victims a campaign, a cause to champion, a justification for victimising others.

Finally, James nicely summarises the way that finding an appropriate scapegoat brings order and peace to a community. Dalgliesh is musing about how suspects feel about the police:

"At first he and his team are awaited and greeted with relief. Action would be taken, the case cleared up, the horror which was also an embarrassment would be salved, the innocent vindicated, the guilty -- probably a stranger whose fate could cause no distress -- would be arrested and dealt with. Law, reason and order would replace the contaminating disorder of murder. But there had been no arrest and no sign of one. It was still early days, but for the small company at the Manor there was no foreseeable end to his presence or to his questioning. He understood their growing resentment .... "

Later she alludes briefly to the psychology of suspicion:

"Murder was a contaminating crime, subtly changing relationships which, even if not close, had been easy and without strain .... It wasn't a question of active suspicion, more the spread of an atmosphere of unease, a growing awareness that other people, other minds, were unknowable."

Just finished The Likeness by Tana French, which follows on her evocative debut of last year, In the Woods, both set in Ireland. The Likeness would be a great readlike for Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with its focus on a closely knit group of college-aged students (grad-school-aged, in this case) who have secrets.

French's writing and emotional sensitivity are both superb.

The elements that most interested me are the thread of sacrifice woven throughout the book, French's evocation of sadness, and her portrayal of the settled, harmonious, familial, habitual, insidious, dysfunctional, oppressive, romanticised and idealised relationships and lifestyle among the five friends. I think that besides sacrifice, one of the major themes of the book is home: what constitutes home, family, the places we are free, the places we are held; and how some people sacrifice everything to create home, and some feel it a threat they have to run from, and some never find it, and some luck into it for a week, a year, a decade, a lifetime.

Sacrifice

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is the truth, and you don't get much higher or much more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover ... is anything or everything you've got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the oldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose." [Cassie]

"Look at the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forward to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, became the sacrifice for their safety. If he refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart -- and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. ... But now ... Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he's started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousands for reasons that have no roots in any reality." [Daniel]

"Regardless of what advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice." [Daniel]

"[J]ust like Daniel, I've always known there was a price to pay. What Daniel didn't know, or didn't mention, is what I said right at the beginning: the price is a wildfire shape-changing thing, and you're not always the one who chooses, you're not always allowed to know in advance, what it's going to be." [Cassie]

Near the end [spoiler alert], Cassie considers mercy, which you can also look at in terms of what people are willing to sacrifice, including themselves:

"There's so little mercy in this world. Lexie sliced straight through everyone who got between her and the door, people she had laughed with, worked with, lain down with. Daniel, who loved her like his blood, sat beside her and watched her die, sooner than allow a siege on his spellbound castle. Frank took me by the shoulders and steered me straight into something he knew could eat me alive. Whitethorn House let me into its secret chambers and healed my wounds, and in exchange I set my careful charges and blew it to smithereens. Rob, my partner, my shieldmate, my closest friend, ripped me out of his life and threw me away because he wanted me to sleep with him, and I did it. And when we had all finished clawing chunks off each other, Sam, who had every right to give me the finger and walk away for good, stayed because I held out my hand and asked him to."

There's also some philosophising about content and discontent, with language about 'the sacred' and 'exterminated at all costs':

Abby says:

"our entire society's based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that's the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you're perfectly happy with what you've got -- specifically if what you've got isn't even all that spectacular -- then you're dangerous. You're breaking all the rules, you're undermining the sacred economy, you're challenging every assumption that society's built on."

Daniel takes it up:

"I think you've got something there. ... Not jealousy, after all: fear. It's a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history -- even a hundred years ago, even fifty -- it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, that danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment. What a strange reversal."

The Friends

"On weekends they worked on the house; occasionally, if the weather was good, they took a picnic somewhere. Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn't own a TV, never mind a computer ....  They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie."

"They were very tactile, all of them. We never touched in college, but at home, someone was always touching someone: Daniel's hand on Abby's head as he passed behind her chair, Rafe's arm on Justin's shoulder as they examined some spare-room discovery together, Abby lying back in the swing seat across my lap and Justin's, Rafe's ankles crossed over mine as we read by the fire. ... I was on full alert for any kind of sexual vibe ... and that wasn't what I was picking up. It was stranger and more powerful than that: they didn't have boundaries, not among themselves, not the way most people do. ... [A]s far as I could tell, everything, except thank God underwear, belonged to all of them. The guys pulled clothes out of the airing cupboard at random, anything that would fit; I never did figure out which tops were Lexie's and which ones were Abby's. They ripped sheets of paper out of each other's notepads, ate toast off the nearest plate, took sips out of whatever glass was handy."

This is what I am always looking for, and idealised as it is, I have sometimes lucked into it.

Sadness

"I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there anymore. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past."

"We did something good. I thought that meant no damage could come of it. It's occured to me since that I may be a lot dumber than I look. ... If I learned one thing ... it's that innocence isn't enough. ... I didn't even try to explain to him what I was seeing, the fine spreading web through which we had all tugged one another to this place, the multiple innocences that make up guilt."

Shelf Awareness briefly interviews one of my favourite crime novelists, Reginald Hill, for their daily email, timed for the publication of his latest Dalziel and Pascoe mystery, The Price of Butcher's Meat -- which, tragically, is not yet listed as 'on order' or owned by any library in my community's library loan system. It's available now!

Turns out he's enamored of literary classics written by George Eliot, Dickens, and Austen, as well as contemporary works by the likes of Terry Pratchett, Markus Zusak, and David Mitchell.  Not a big fan of JK Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, paperback version) he bought for the cover, "'but only because there was also on offer a version with a dull anonymous cover so that sensitive adults didn't have to reveal they were reading a kids' book on the train! That struck me as really sad, so I bought the original and flourished it for all to marvel at my childishness on the way home. Didn't enjoy it all that much though, but who am I to disagree with x million readers across the whole age range?'"

I've lauded Hill before, here and here, oh, and here, at least.

(Photo from Fantastic Fiction.)

Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why -- the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the KwikTrip, the Food Network after ten p.m.

In 100 words or less, please answer the question, "What makes you so unhappy?" in the comments field [at his site]. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos's new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009 or early 2010.

I'm not the first to say it, but, hey, way to outsource the novel!

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to exist simply because you couldn't see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: 'person permanence.' Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. ... We can't simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight."

>> For a Fee, a Thai Temple Offers a Head Start on Rebirth by Seth Mydans in the NYT, 26 Sept. 2008. (Reminds me of a vividly described scene in the movie My Dinner with Andre.)  What interests me about the Thai story is the explicit connection between anxiety due to the state of the economy (i.e., decline in prosperity) and the need for this kind of burial and resurrection ritual:

"Nine big pink coffins dominate the grand hall of the temple, and every day hundreds of people take their turns climbing in for a [minute and a half] as monks chant a dirge. Then, at a command, the visitors clamber out again cleansed -- they believe -- of the past. ... A cardboard sign warns visitors not to stand behind the coffins, where bad karma sucked from the 'dying' devotees may still be hovering ...

"It is a renewal for our times, as recent economic hardship brings uncertainty and people try seeking a bailout on life. In growing numbers, they come here from around Thailand to join what has become an assembly line of resurrection.

"'When the economy is down, we latch our hopes onto some supernatural power,' said Ekachai Uekrongtham, the writer-director whose movie The Coffin is in Thai cinemas now with a plot revolving around such funerals for the living."

>> Psychology Voting: 'My Candidate, Myself,' by Robert Burton in Salon, 22 Sept. 2008 (I previously cited Burton's work on certainty when it appeared in a 9 Oct. SciAm piece): The lead-off quote is this: "Let's make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times" -- George W. Bush, 2008.

Burton laments humans' inability to change our minds, to view our own opinions with skepticism, to refuse to be swayed by logical appeal.

He cites a 1999 paper reporting on a study of Cornell undergraduates, which found that the most incompetent people overestimate their abilities to the greatest degree. In other words, "People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's." And, conversely, "smart people tend to believe that everyone else 'gets it.'" They overestimate other people's abilities.

Further: "Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one's decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right. ... [F]eelings of conviction, certainty and other similar states of 'knowing what we know' may feel like logical conclusions, but are in fact involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason. ...  The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought." And, "Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments."

He cites another study in which "staunch party members from both sides" are asked to "evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice:

"Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system -- the center for emotional processing -- lit up dramatically. ...'[B]oth Republicans and Democrats 'reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted.'"

Burton suggests that we would know more about our political candidates if we could give them thought experiments that would demonstrate how they think. He'd also like to focus on "each candidate's intellectual grasp of scientific method, from choosing and evaluating evidence to seeing how they would respond to a well-constructed contrary line of reasoning." And what do they do when they are presented with evidence that their answers are wrong? Can the candidates recognise their intellectual limitations? And can we?

I think I'd find a report of a typical or atypical day in anyone's life interesting, and Doris Lessing's, a mixture of 'what I do each day' with her reflections on health, life, and reading, is no exception:

"Luxury has never interested me, but I enjoyed staying at good hotels when I travelled. In Vienna, at the Hotel Sacher, I was in my room, marvelling at the rugs, eating sachertorte, thinking, 'This is perfection,' when a piece of chandelier fell on the floor. I laughed --  perfection is not so easily achieved."

"Last night I dreamt about a Jesus-type figure in Palestine in the old days -- which is not really my country at all. It was very convincing. This Jesus chap was worrying about what he was going to get for people to eat. Ordinary problems -- just like a housewife's. "

Or, why I'm an Anglophile.

From the Sept. 2008 Oldie:

"[Duncan] Campbell recalls bumping into former bank robber Bobby King in a pub. 'He had done an Open University degree in prison. He was reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I mentioned this to another bank robber I knew who'd also done an OU degree and, without blinking, he replied, 'Not her best.'"

From Maureen Lipman's essay on appearing in a regional production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, with her dog, and her dog's understudy: "Chichister audiences accepted a black Labrador in rural Russia with the same aplomb as they'd accepted the barkless dog of the African Congo. ... Our favourite comment on the production was made by two white-haired ladies wearing floral dresses as they left the theatre: 'Well, I thought it was very enjoyable, didn't you, Mary? But why on earth they had to set it in Russia is beyond me.'"

Jeremy Lewis writing about 'prolific playwright and diarist Simon Gray,' who died in August: "But he was also extremely funny. Writing in the Observer, Claire Tomalin recalled how Harold Pinter sent the cricket-loving Gray a poem he had just written, which read 'I saw Len Hutton in his prime / Another time, another time.' Hearing nothing, he rang for a reaction. 'I haven't finished reading it yet,' Gray replied."

Phrase to use more often: barking mad.